Rate My Professor Elyn Saks

Elyn Saks is the Orrin B. Evans Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where she has been on the faculty since 1989. She serves as Director of the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and Faculty at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. Saks earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1977, M.Litt. from Oxford University in 1981 as a Marshall Scholar, J.D. from Yale Law School in 1986 as editor of the Yale Law Journal, Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Science from the New Center for Psychoanalysis in 2010, and an honorary LL.D. from Pepperdine University in 2010. Her career includes positions as staff attorney at Connecticut Legal Services from 1986 to 1987, instructor at the University of Bridgeport School of Law from 1987 to 1989, progression through assistant, associate, and full professor ranks at USC Gould, and Associate Dean for Research from 2005 to 2010.

Saks specializes in mental health law, with research interests in law and mental health, ethical dimensions of psychiatric research, and forced treatment of people with mental illness. She has published five books, including Informed Consent to Psychoanalysis: The Law, the Theory, and the Data (Fordham University Press, 2013), The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hyperion, 2007), Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Interpreting Interpretation: The Limits of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis (Yale University Press, 1999), and Jekyll on Trial: Multiple Personality Disorder and Criminal Law (New York University Press, 1997), along with more than fifty articles and book chapters in outlets such as Schizophrenia Bulletin, Lancet Psychiatry, and Southern California Review of Law & Social Justice. Among her honors are the 2009 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, Time Magazine's 2007 Top Ten Non-Fiction Book of the Year for her memoir, Phi Beta Kappa membership, and awards from organizations including National Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health America. In 2013, she was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to the Center for Mental Health Services National Advisory Council and serves on boards of Mental Health Advocacy Services, Bring Change 2 Mind, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the Burton Blatt Institute.