Online Mental Disability Law Program: About the Program Director

Michael L. Perlin is Professor of Law at New York Law School, director of the Online Mental Disability Law Program, and director of the International Mental Disability Law Reform Project of the law school’s Justice Action Center. He holds teaching appointments as Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Law at the University of Rochester Medical Center and at New York University School of Medicine. He is a former Director of the Division of Mental Health Advocacy in the New Jersey Department of the Public Advocate, and the former Deputy Public Defender in charge of the Mercer County Trenton New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. Professor Perlin now serves on the Board of Advisors of Mental Disabilities Rights International, and on the Board of Directors of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health. In conjunction with Mental Disability Rights International, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights advocacy organization, he has presented mental disability law training workshops in Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Uruguay. Recently, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute-Law in Florence, Italy, a Visiting Professor at Abo Akademi University/Turku University Law School in Turku, Finland, and a Visiting Scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Previously, Professor Perlin was an Adjunct Professor of Law and Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno, California, the Pfizer Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wright State University School of Medicine, and the Ida Beem Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University at Iowa Law School and Medical College.

Professor Perlin is the creator of the first Internet-based mental disability law courses to be offered by an American law school. International sections of Survey of Mental Disability Law, New York Law School’s initial online course, have been offered in Japan, and Nicaragua; a section of the international course has been offered in Finland.

Professor Perlin's three-volume treatise, Mental Disability Law, Civil and Criminal, won the 1990 Walter Jeffords Writing Prize, and has since been expanded into a five-volume second edition that was the recipient of the 2003 Otto Walter Writing Prize. His book, The Jurisprudence of the Insanity Defense, won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law as the best book of the year in law and forensic psychiatry in 1994-95; he has also written a one-volume treatise on mental health law, Law and Mental Disability, and has published a casebook, Mental Disability Law: Cases and Materials that is now in its second edition. Another book, The Hidden Prejudice: Mental Disability on Trial, was published in 2000 as part of the American Psychological Association Press's Law, Society and Psychology series, and also received the Otto Walter Writing Prize. Professor Perlin's The Essentials of New York Mental Health Law was published in 2003. His latest casebooks are International Human Rights and Comparative Mental Disability Law (2006), and Lawyering Skills in the Representation of Persons with Mental Disabilities (2006). He has written well over 175 articles on all aspects of mental disability law. In 1988, Professor Perlin was given the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law's Amicus Award. He graduated magna cum laude from Rutgers University and from Columbia University Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.