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.

Glenn M. Weaver, M.D. (1921-2007) was a leader in the fields of law and psychiatry who devoted his talents and energy to promoting mutual understanding between his two areas of expertise.  Since its inception in 1998, the Weaver Institute has endeavored to emulate the professional excellence, dedication to community service, and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that characterized Dr. Weaver’s professional and personal life.

Dr. Weaver's medical career spanned more than six decades.  The respect he enjoyed among his colleagues was evidenced by his lengthy tenure as the Director of the Department of Psychiatry at Cincinnati's Christ Hospital and his service as an expert witness in hundreds of trials and legal proceedings throughout the United States. No less important was the impact that Dr. Weaver's professional skills as a physician and therapist had on the lives of his patients.

Dr. Weaver was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. He received his BS degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1943 and his MD from UC's College of Medicine in 1945. After completing an internship at St. Louis City Hospital, he served as Captain in the US Army Medical Corps in Germany during the military occupation that followed World War II. He then returned to Cincinnati for his psychiatry residency, training at Cincinnati General Hospital, Longview State Hospital, and Christ Hospital.

After completing his residency, Dr. Weaver practiced clinical psychiatry in Cincinnati for the next 55 years. For more than 20 years, he served as an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC's College of Medicine. He later became Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Coordinator of Teaching and Psychiatry at The Christ Hospital. He also testified as an expert witness in hundreds of trials and legal proceedings across the United States.

Dr. Weaver's intense interest in the interaction between law and psychiatry led him to spend countless hours promoting a greater understanding of how these two areas intersect. A specialist in the field of forensic psychiatry since its development in the 1950s, he was a charter member of the Midwest Chapter of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. In addition to treating outpatients and inpatients, Dr. Weaver served as a consultant and special examiner for local courts and agencies. In 1984, he became one of the first medical professionals in the region to be board certified in forensic psychiatry. He also served as president of the Cincinnati Society of Psychiatry and the Cincinnati Society of Neurology and Psychiatry. He was a member of the American Academy of Legal Medicine, the American Society of Law and Medicine, the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, and the American College of Legal Medicine.

In 1986, Dr. Weaver began teaching Law and Psychiatry as an adjunct professor at the College of Law. Always interested in advancing his own knowledge, Dr. Weaver also took many law school classes, including criminal law, torts, evidence, and procedure.  Decades of law students knew Dr. Weaver as a fellow student, and students who took Dr. Weaver's course often had the startling experience of discovering that one of their teachers was also their classmate!

In 1998, he founded The Glenn M. Weaver Institute for Law and Psychiatry.  The Weaver Institute is dedicated to helping law students and practicing attorneys learn how psychiatry contributes to the resolution of very diverse legal issues, including criminal, civil, correctional, or legislative matters, along with social policy that affects mental health and legal concerns.

As a humanitarian and community servant, Dr. Weaver took active, leadership roles in dozens of neighborhood and community organizations. He felt that professional recognition and personal achievements were inconsequential if the fruits of those achievements are not employed to enlighten society and improve the human condition.  Dr. Weaver's devotion to bettering the community was at the core of his vision for the Weaver Institute.

Dr. Weaver maintained an active psychiatric practice and continued to teach at the College of Law until just three weeks before his death on October 25, 2007, at age 86 years.  Dean Louis Bilionis observed that Dr. Weaver “helped transform the College of Law.  His vision for the Institute that bears his name, his drive to see it succeed, and his passion for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry were inspiring. Evidence of Glenn's insight and generosity can be found inside and outside the classroom, in our conferences and lectures and the scholarly publications produced by our faculty and students. We have lost an engaged and engaging colleague, and a dear friend."

Dr. Weaver is a greatly missed colleague and friend of the College of Law. We remember him as a thoughtful and ever-curious clinician, a dedicated teacher, an extremely generous gentleman, an avid consumer and admirer of scholarship in science and the law, and as a superb exemplar of life-long learning. The Weaver Institute is honored to carry his name, and proudly strives to promote the values exemplified by his exceptional life and career.

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 $4200. 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.

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.

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.