Michael L. Perlin will be speaking at a faculty workshop from noon – 1:00 p.m. on Friday, March 16th in the Strong Common Room in Bergin Hall. The title of his presentation is "International Human Rights and Comparative Mental Disability Law: The Universal Factors."
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 Medical School. 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. In 2005, he was 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.
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, Nicaragua, and Finland, and an international section of The Americans with Disabilities Act has been offered in Japan. Other partnerships have been created with five US-based law schools.
Professor Perlin has written seventeen books and 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. He was given the Manfred Guttmacher Award by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law in 1995 for the best book of the year in forensic psychiatry (The Jurisprudence of the Insanity Defense). He is also at work on an article on the jurisprudence of Bob Dylan.
