The goal of this course is to teach students the special advocacy skills needed by lawyers and expert witnesses that are essential in cases involving persons with mental disabilities. The course will cover topics including civil commitment standards; outpatient commitment; issues of proof; dealing with expert witnesses;  rights to community services; forensic issues; patient advocacy issues; and dealing with stigma/public awareness.

In addition to the lecture-based presentations on streaming video (that are the basis in all of the online mental disability law courses), this course includes two simulated trials, one of an involuntary civil commitment case, and one of an incompetency to stand trial hearing.  The lawyers and judges in these simulated trials are the course instructors; the patients are depicted by attorneys whose work focus is mental disability law; the expert witnesses are forensic psychiatrists (all of whom have studied with program director, Professor Perlin).

Explores legal, policy, and practical implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act as it applies to people with both physical and mental disabilities (with a significant focus on issues involving mental disability).

The course will cover the wide range of disability-based discrimination that the ADA addresses, including questions of discrimination; access to services; access to the judicial system; institutional rights; and community rights.  Students will study the contextualization of the ADA and mental disability law jurisprudence; definitions of "disability"; issues involving employment discrimination; discrimination in public accommodations and  professional licensing; housing discrimination; discrimination in public services; institutional segregation as discrimination; the ADA & the criminal justice system; and sovereign immunity & access to courts.

This course will deal with both the reports that are prepared by forensic experts for use by lawyers (both pre-trial and at trial), and with the ethical issues that are posed when such experts interact with the legal system. The focus will be on the full range of issues involving forensic experts and the mental disability law system: the rights of persons subject to institutionalization and who have been institutionalized, and the role of mental disability in the criminal trial process, in the civil trial process, in the criminal trial process, and in the family law process. Therapeutic jurisprudence implications will be also be explored, as will a consideration of the varying ethical codes that apply to the different mental health professions.

This course will examine the relationship between constitutional mental disability law and international human rights law, primarily as that relationship deals with questions of legislative drafting, legal representation, institutional treatment, community care, and forensic mental health systems.  It will cover a comparison of civil and common law systems, an overview of international human rights law, an overview of regional human rights tribunals, an overview of US constitutional mental disability law, the role of "sanism" and "pretextuality" in understanding developments in this area, mental disability law in an international human rights context, comparative mental disability law, the use of institutional psychiatry as a means of suppressing political dissension, the "universal factors" in this area of law, and the globalization of disability law.  The focus will be on both American law and on international human rights norms (e.g., the UN Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness), and the developing body of case law in the Inter-American and European Courts and Commissions on Human Rights.

Offers a comprehensive overview of the mental disability law issues in correctional settings (jails & prisons).  Topics include the historical development of the constitutional right to correctional health and mental health care, issues involving staffing, transfer, record keeping, suicide prevention, the significance of professional standards, the relationship between correctional mental health care and community systems of care, monitoring, informed consent, risk assessment, and privatization of services.

This course will deal with the relationship between mental illness, dangerous behavior and the police power, the ability of mental health professionals to predict dangerousness, and the significance of risk assessment instruments for a variety of decisions to be made in the legal system. Students will discover how these relationships and concepts play out” in a variety of settings, including involuntary civil commitments, right to refuse treatment, insanity defense acquittee retention hearings, sex offender status hearings, sentencing cases, death penalty “future dangerousness” inquiries, death penalty mitigation hearings, and Tarasoff (duty to protect) cases in civil law.

This course will review contemporary public policy regarding sexually coercive behavior. A major focus will be the aggressive legislative approaches to sexual violence developed in the United States over the past 15 years. We will examine and evaluate these controversial legal approaches, as well as alternative approaches to the societal effort to address sexual violence. The course will include an examination of the current state of social science research into sexual violence, including etiology, classification, treatment, supervision, recidivism, and risk assessment. Our examination of legislative approaches to sexual violence will seek an understanding of the operation of these laws, the constitutional litigation challenging them, the legal issues currently in controversy, and an attempt to assess their efficacy as part of a system for addressing sexual violence in society. The course will address issues at a variety of levels of abstraction, examining the morality of the laws, their implications for public policy and the fight against sexual violence, as well as the practical skills and knowledge necessary for lawyers and other professionals to operate effectively.

Students will examine the civil and constitutional bases of mental disability law in such areas as civil commitment; institutional rights (with specific focus on the right to refuse treatment); and deinstitutionalization, aftercare, and federal statutory rights (with specific focus on the Americans with Disabilities Act).  Students will explore all aspects of the role of mental disability in the criminal trial process, including criminal incompetencies; insanity defense; sexually violent predator laws; federal sentencing guidelines; and the death penalty.

Students will also study the history of mental disability law and why and how it has developed as it has; and most importantly, why judges and fact finders decide mental disability law cases the way they do, to facilitate our predictions of future trends and outcomes.

Students explore the proposition that all aspects of the legal system (and all roles played by judicial actors) have some therapeutic impact on mentally disabled individuals who are litigants or are the subject of litigation. The course focuses on the empirical issues and social assumptions underlying the major mental disability legal doctrines developed in the past three decades in such areas as involuntary civil commitment law, rights of persons institutionalized because of disability, correctional law, the criminal trial process, legal education, and international human rights law.