Mental Retardation And The Law

This book is the formal presentation of the issues discussed at the Second National Conference on the Legal Rights of Citizens with Mental Retardation. A relationship between the community and its citizens with mental retardation is discussed extensively in the first section of the book. Other sections of the book are devoted to key litigation and legislation for the rights of citizens with mental retardation, law as it pertains to newborns with severe handicaps, advances in education and rehabilitation, and future strategies for advocacy. A few of the noted contributors include Carl R. Halpern, Dean of the CUNY Law School, Professor Robert A. Burt of Yale University, and Professor Robert H. Mnookin of Stanford University. This book is designed as a basic reference for advocates and others concerned with the mentally retarded.

Engaging in sex, becoming parents, raising children: these are among the most personal decisions we make, and for people with mental retardation, these decisions are consistently challenged, regulated, and outlawed. This book is a comprehensive study of the American legal doctrines and social policies, past and present, that have governed procreation and parenting by persons with mental retardation. It argues persuasively that people with retardation should have legal authority to make their own decisions. Despite the progress of the normalization movement, which has moved so many people with mental retardation into the mainstream since the 1960s, negative myths about reproduction and child rearing among this population persist. Martha Field and Valerie Sanchez trace these prejudices to the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They show how misperceptions have led to inconsistent and discriminatory outcomes when third parties seek to make birth control or parenting decisions for people with mental retardation. They also explore the effect of these decisions on those they purport to protect. Detailed, thorough, and just, their book is a sustained argument for reform of the legal practices and social policies it describes.

A barrage of "handbooks" and "resource manuals" aimed at employers and legal practitioners on the employment rights of people with disabilities has begun to appear. Until now, however, there has been no serious book-length scholarly treatment of how mental disorder can affect work, how work can affect mental disorder, and the role of law in addressing employment discrimination based on mental rather than physical disability. In Mental Disorder, Work Disability and the Law, the editors bring together original work by leading scholars who have studied mental disorder and work disability from the fields of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, law, and economics. The authors' contributions build upon one another to create the first integrated account of the important policy issues at stake when law deals with the rights of mentally disordered citizens to work when they are able to, and to receive benefits when they are not. This book will be of great value to scholars in law and the mental health professions and to policy makers and the administrators of disability programs.

This new book written by ABA Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law Director, John Parry, J.D. and forensic psychologist, Eric Y. Drogin, J.D., Ph.D., Manual has been formatted and written to guide lawyers, judges, law students, and forensic and other mental disability professionals through the maze of civil and criminal laws, standards, and evidentiary pitfalls, and forensic practices that characterize this area of the law. Moreover, it summarizes what empirical evidence exists to support or raise concerns about these legal standards and forensic practices when they are introduced in the courtroom.