The Lawsuit that Closed Willowbrook

 [We have the following announcement. DRE]

Willowbrook State School: How a Lawsuit Closed the Gates to a Notorious Institution and Opened the Doors of Opportunity for Thousands, presented by the Historical Society of the New York Courts in collaboration with the Willowbrook Legacy Committee.  September 22 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm EDT. Free In-Person and Online Event at the New York City Bar Association.  Open to the Public.

Credit: NYPL

Willowbrook State School was an infamous institution on Staten Island built to care for those with developmental disabilities.  In January 1972, television reporter Geraldo Rivera brought his camera to Willowbrook  and reported on the horrible conditions at the  “school,” once described by Sen. Robert Kennedy as a “snake pit.” Two months later, lawyers from the NYCLU and the NY Legal Aid Society, on behalf of residents, parents and organizations filed a class action lawsuit arguing that residents had a constitutional right to treatment and sought injunctive relief. A distinguished panel of attorneys who have been involved with this case will discuss the filing of the complaint, the entry of a Consent Judgment and the continuing nature of the litigation. The panel will also discuss the importance and relevance of Willowbrook today.

See images of the terrible conditions those with developmental disabilities were forced to endure on the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance website.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Beth Haroules, Esq., Senior Staff Attorney, New York Civil Liberties Union
Christopher Hansen, Esq., Senior National Staff Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union
Hon. Robert M. Levy, United States Magistrate Judge for the Eastern District of New York
Paul Kietzman, Esq., Of Counsel, Barclay Damon LLP

NY CLE Credits currently pending for members of the Historical Society of the New York Courts. Registration Opening Soon!

Morse on the Insanity Defense

Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania Law School, has posted Before and after Hinckley: Legal Insanity in the United States, which is forthcoming in The Insanity Defence: International and Comparative Perspectives (2022), edited by Ronnie Mackay and  Warren Brookbanks:

This chapter first considers the direction of the affirmative defense of legal insanity in the United States before John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity in 1982 for attempting to assassinate President Reagan and others and the immediate aftermath of that acquittal. Since the middle of the 20th Century, the tale is one of the rise and fall of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code test for legal insanity. Then it turns to the constitutional decisions of the United States Supreme Court concerning the status of legal insanity. Finally, it addresses the substantive and procedural changes that have occurred in the insanity defense since the wave of legal changes following the Hinckley decision.

--Dan Ernst

Evans on Blumenthal and the mind

Catherine L. Evans, University of Toronto, has published a review essay in Law & Social Inquiry on Susanna L. Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (2016). Here's the abstract for "Wondrous Depths: Judging the Mind in Nineteenth-Century America," LSI 44:3 (Aug. 2019), 828-49:

Susanna L. Blumenthal’s Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (2016) is a history of the self in nineteenth-century America. When judges considered a person’s criminal responsibility or civil capacity in court, they created a body of legal and political thought about the self, society, the economy, and American democracy. This essay uses Blumenthal’s book to explore recent work on law and the mind in Britain and North America, and argues that abstract questions about free will, the self, and the mind were part of the everyday jurisprudence of the nineteenth century. Debates about responsibility were also debates about the psychological consequences of capitalism and the borders of personhood and citizenship at a time of rapid economic, political, and social change.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi