Internationally known author and legal scholar Elyn R. Saks will deliver Georgia State University College of Law’s 54th Henry J. Miller Distinguished Lecture at noon Tuesday, Oct. 14, in the Student Center.
Saks, the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. specializes in mental health law, criminal law and children and the law. Her research focuses on ethical dimensions of psychiatric research and forced treatment of the mentally ill. She also teaches at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Law at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.
Her memoir, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness,” describes her personal experience overcoming chronic schizophrenia at age 28, defying doctors’ “grave” diagnosis and choosing instead to write the narrative of her life.
“For the better part of two decades, Saks was well-known as a scholar whose interests spanned the fields of law and psychiatry. With the publication of her memoir in 2007, both her scholarship and her life as a person with schizophrenia were thrust into the public arena and became a matter of public record,” says Paul Lombardo, the Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law, who was instrumental in bringing Saks to Georgia State Law.
“Few people have had as profound an impact as she has on our national conversation about mental disability,” Lombardo says. “We are exceptionally fortunate to have Professor Saks at Georgia State Law to share insights that include both professional expertise and personal authority on the subject of mental health and the law.”
Saks, formerly associate dean of the Gould School of Law, received the MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2009 and using funds from the “genius grant,” created the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Prior to joining the law faculty, she was an attorney in Connecticut and instructor at the University of Bridgeport School of Law.
She graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University before earning her master of letters from Oxford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she also edited the Yale Law Journal. Saks holds a Ph.D. in psychoanalytic science from the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.
The Henry J. Miller Distinguished Lecture Series is supported by the Charles Loridans Foundation Inc. and named for Henry J. Miller, a partner in the law firm of Alston & Bird for more than 50 years. Miller's legacy continues to live in his role as mentor to generations of Atlanta's professional community.
This event, held in the Student Center First Floor Ballroom, is by invitation only.