Our Mission:

• to provide opportunities — including classroom instruction, educational symposia, and public lectures — that encourage law students and legal practitioners to learn more about mental health law
• to teach students and legal practitioners about the many contexts in which the law uses information from the fields of psychiatry and psychology
• to promote scholarship and learning in forensic psychiatry
• to encourage attorneys and students to develop the interests, skills, and talents needed to deal successfully with psychiatric evidence in court
• to help students interested in mental health law and psychiatry develop the knowledge and background needed to handle psychiatric issues that affect criminal adjudication, civil cases, correctional decision-making, and legislation

The Weaver Institute was established in 1998 in conjunction with a generous gift from Glenn M. Weaver, M.D., an Adjunct Professor of Law and a long-time friend of the College of Law.

Weaver Institute Fellows
Each year, the Weaver Institute awards fellowships to students based on academic merit, law school performance, and their demonstrated interest in mental health law. The Weaver Institute awards between two and four fellowships a year to second and third year law students. Each fellowship carries an annual stipend, currently $3750.  Through formal course work, seminars, guest lectures, meetings, and community activities, Weaver Fellows learn about the identification, medical treatment, and prevention of psychiatric disorders along with the many ways in which mental illness has legal significance. In addition, each Weaver Fellow writes an independent research paper for publication that addresses an issue in mental health law.

Weaver Institute Research Projects and Activities
As part of its mission as an educational organization, the Weaver Institute sponsors a wide variety of conferences, symposia and lectures. Here are some examples:

• In May 2001, the Weaver Institute hosted the Second International Conference of Therapeutic Jurisprudence. Attended by nearly 200 people, this conference featured nearly 50 presentations by speakers from all over the world on subjects as diverse as the role of apology in the law and the therapeutic impact of sexual predator commitment laws.
• In March 2006, the Weaver Institute held “The Future of the ‘Duty to Protect’: Scientific and Legal Perspectives on Tarasoff's Thirtieth Anniversary.”  This all-day symposium featured presentations by seven nationally renowned psychiatrists and law professors.  More than 150 attorneys and mental health professionals attended, and the presenters’ papers formed the Winter 2006 issue of the University of Cincinnati Law Review.
• More than 150 physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and attorneys attended the Weaver Institute’s April 2007 symposium, “Law, Ethics, Psychiatry & the Human Genome.”  At this event, experts in medical ethics, psychiatry, genetics, and health law described how the recent sequencing of the human genome will soon have far-reaching effects on social and legal institutions.
• Nearly 200 law students, mental health professionals, practicing attorneys, and philosophy graduate students came to “Revising the Frontiers of Responsibility and Blame: How Neuroscience Is Reshaping Philosophy and the Criminal Law,” the Weaver Institute’s October 2007 symposium.  Presentations by psychiatrists, law professors, and philosophers examined issues such as: Will science’s rapidly advancing discoveries about the brain soon make punishment and personal responsibility obsolete?  How will 21st-century psychiatric explanation change our fundamental notions of guilt, innocence, good, and evil?

The Weaver Fellows’ independent research projects are academic projects that combine intensive faculty supervision with the challenges and rewards of academic legal research.  In completing their projects, fellows earn both publication credit and serve the legal community by solving problems and raising awareness of how mental health issues affect the law. Recent research projects have included a legal analysis of mentally ill persons’ right to refuse treatment, the effect of the Supreme Court's Atkins v. Virginia decision on death row inmates, and accessibility to state court systems for individuals with mental disabilities.

Weaver Institute Speakers Series
In the Weaver Institute Speakers Series, a diverse group of law school faculty members, mental health practitioners, and judges share their ideas, research, and writing with the local and University community.  Among these meetings are monthly dinner get-togethers with faculty and fellows from the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine.