The kinds of activities that the Center will sponsor are illustrated by several already-planned events that deal with therapeutic jurisprudence.  These include a program that occurred on January 23, 2009, at the law school, entitled “Overcoming the Stigma of Disability,” at which Professor Elyn Saks of the University of Southern California Law School, Professor Steven Wizner of the Yale Law School, Professor Stephen Behnke, the Director of Ethics of the American Psychological Association, and Professor Winick made presentations.  The speakers subsequently will prepare short essays based on their presentations, and Professor Winick will seek publication in a law journal for this mini-symposium. 

• Also illustrative is a juvenile justice program that occurred on January 30, 2009, co-sponsored by the law school and the University of Miami Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.  Professors Winick and Perlmutter spoke on sessions relating to juvenile shackling and juvenile transfer, two topics upon which they are conducting therapeutic jurisprudence research.  The conference received funding from the Miami-Dade County Children’s Trust. 
• Further illustrative is a symposium held on February 27, 2009, at the Florida Coastal Law School in Jacksonville in conjunction with the Florida Coastal Law Review.  It was a symposium on therapeutic jurisprudence, including Professor Winick, Professor Wexler, Professor Susan Daicoff of the Florida Coastal Law School, and other presenters, and will result in a symposium issue of the Florida Coastal Law Review devoted to therapeutic jurisprudence. Professor Winick presented a paper entitled “Aging, Driving, and Public Health: A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Approach.”
• A future program is being planned at the law school on public health and therapeutic jurisprudence.  This program is in the early planning stages, and will involve Professor Jose Szapozniak, Chair of the University of Miami Medical School’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and members of his department, as well as Professor Winick.
• On May 12, 2009, Professor Winick will speak at a conference at the University of Zurich Law School.  His topic will be Law as a Healing Profession.  Professor Winick gave a lecture on therapeutic jurisprudence in May of 2008 at the University of Zurich Law School, and in this program, Professor Winick will present the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence to a wider audience of practicing lawyers and psychologists in Switzerland. 
• On May 20, 2009, the Center, will present a panel at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco.  Professor Winick has been working with the forensic fellows and Dr. Anthony Castro of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences on research concerning an innovative therapeutic jurisprudence court, the Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence/Mental Health Court.  We have been working with Judge Deborah White-Labora, the judge who started this program, and Professor Winick, Dr. Castro, and the two forensic fellows will be presenting a program at the annual APA meeting describing this emerging judicial model and reporting on a longitudinal study that is still in progress.  Additional data is being collected, and a grant will be sought to enable the collection and analysis of this data.  An article growing out of the study will be published in a legal or interdisciplinary journal.
• From June 28-July 5, 2009, Professor Winick, on behalf of The Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center, will coordinate twenty-one separate therapeutic jurisprudence sessions at the annual meeting of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health in New York City, which will be held at the NYU School of Law.  In addition to Professor Winick, several of our law school faculty members will be speaking at the New York Conference.  These include Professors Donald Jones, Bernard Perlmutter, Egardo Rotman, Sarah Mourer, and Jennifer Zawid.  Professors Winick and Wexler will edit a symposium issue of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry on therapeutic jurisprudence, in which papers presented by some of the scholars at the New York meeting will be published.
• In July, 2009, Professors Winick and Wexler will co-teach a course in therapeutic jurisprudence at the London summer program held by our law school.  Judges and scholars interested in therapeutic jurisprudence in the U.K. will be involved. 

Future symposia, conferences, and academic programs will be held under the auspices of the Center at which Professor Winick and other law school faculty affiliated with the Center will participate. 

The Center will seek government and foundation grants to allow it to conduct empirical research on the courts in South Florida and elsewhere.  The past twenty years have seen the emergence of a variety of new judicial models, based on principles of therapeutic jurisprudence, that are designed to rehabilitate offenders and to assist victims of crime.  Miami-Dade County has been an important center for such “problem-solving courts,” as they increasingly are known.  In 1989, the nation’s first drug treatment court was established in Miami-Dade County, and a variety of specialized courts focusing on rehabilitation have since emerged.  The University of Miami Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center will conduct empirical research in the judicial practices and processes in the Miami-Dade County criminal court drug treatment court, family court drug treatment court, dependency court drug treatment court, mental health court, domestic violence/mental health court, and unified family court.  Professor Winick has been discussing with the judges of these courts the performance of empirical research, and has received their approval and cooperation to conduct such research.  He has been working with Professor Richard Wiener of the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology program to develop research on the effectiveness of these court programs and on a variety of judicial techniques that they use and will be implementing.  These courts apply principles and approaches of therapeutic jurisprudence and Professor Winick, Professor Wiener, Dr. Castro, and perhaps members of the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology and the School of Education will collaborate on such research and on obtaining foundation and government grants to perform it.  This is envisioned to be a multi-year project that will produce a variety of published reports and articles in legal and interdisciplinary journals.  Professor Winick is in the process of organizing a Judges’ Advisory Committee to help to plan this research.

The Center also will provide consultation to courts locally and elsewhere.  Professor Winick is currently working with the judges of a variety of problem-solving courts in Miami-Dade County and Broward County and will expand these service projects and include research into the functioning of a number of the problem-solving court models that have been developed using the therapeutic jurisprudence framework.  Professors Winick and Wexler have been the architects of the problem-solving court model.  There now are more than 2000 drug treatment courts in the U.S., more than 200 domestic violence courts, and more than 100 mental health courts.  Moreover, these court models are spreading throughout the world.  Professors Winick and Wexler have published the leading book in the field, Judging in a Therapeutic Key: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Courts (Bruce J. Winick & David B. Wexler eds., 2003), and are frequent speakers at judicial conferences and training sessions.  The Center, perhaps working in conjunction with the University of Miami Medical School's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and with the School of Education, could contract with state court systems throughout the country to assist in the development, evaluation, and improvement of the increasing number of problem-solving courts that have been and will continue to be established as this model grows.

The Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center also will work closely with the law school's existing clinical programs, and will play an important role in the clinical legal education movement.  Therapeutic jurisprudence already has made an important impact on clinical legal education and skills training.  In September, 2005, Professors Winick and Wexler edited a symposium issue of the St. Thomas University Law Review containing 17 articles dealing with the application of therapeutic jurisprudence in differing clinical legal education and skills training contexts.  Professor Winick also has spoken at the annual conference of the clinical section of the Association of American Law Schools, and in 2005, at the UCLA annual conference on Clinical Legal Education.  Professors Winick and Wexler also published an article in the December, 2006 issue of the Clinical Law Review, the leading publication in the field, entitled "The Use of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Law School Clinical Education: Transforming the Criminal Law Clinic."

Professor Winick has worked closely with the University of Miami School of Law's Children and Youth Law Clinic, which explicitly uses therapeutic jurisprudence in its work.  He will continue to be involved in applying therapeutic jurisprudence in cases being litigated by the clinic and in training the clinic's students.  A recent example is the juvenile shackling case being litigated in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties and in several other jurisdictions throughout the U.S., in which Professors Winick and Perlmutter submitted a therapeutic jurisprudence affidavit concerning the anti-rehabilitative affects of the practice automatically of shackling juveniles to one another when they appear in court.  Professors Perlmutter and Winick are working on an amicus brief  to be filed in the Florida Supreme Court in connection with a proposed rule of juvenile procedure on the shackling issue.  Professor Bernard Perlmutter, the Director of the Children and Youth Law Clinic, co-teaches a course in lawyering skills with Professor Winick that is based on the therapeutic jurisprudence model.  They plan to continue their work in this area, and hope to develop a future casebook in lawyering skills that relies on the therapeutic jurisprudence approach.  Professors Winick and Perlmutter would like to extend the interviewing and counseling model they have developed beyond their course, perhaps offering a variant on it as a first-year Spring semester elective, or in a broadened Litigation Skills Program once a new Director is hired, and also using it in the training of students in all of the Law School's clinical programs. 

All five of our law school’s educator  faculty members – Professors Perlmutter, Newman, Williams, Zawid, and Mourer – have expressed interest in working with the Center and in using therapeutic jurisprudence in their clinical programs.  The Center will attempt to facilitate the development of several new clinical programs in which therapeutic jurisprudence will be a major component.  These include placing students in various problem-solving courts in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties under the supervision of Professor Zawid; a new mediation clinic under the supervision of Professor Zawid; Dean Marni Lennon, and adjunct Professor Mel Rubin; an extership clinical program in conjunction with the Office of the Miami-Dade County Public Defender and under the supervision of Professor Mourer, involving the presentation of mitigation evidence in capital cases; and an externship clinical program involving disability and fair housing law in which Professor Winick and Dean Lennon will work with local attorneys doing disability litigation and negotiation and settlement.  The Center also will conduct interviewing and counseling training for the law school’s new immigration clinic, as well as with our existing clinical programs.  The Center thus will work with many of our law students involved in existing and future clinical programs and skills training opportunities. Professor Winick will work with the other clinical law professors at our law school to expand the use of therapeutic jurisprudence in their programs and to develop new ones based on his approach. 

Professors Winick and Perlmutter also will perform empirical research on the juvenile transfer process, by which juveniles are transferred from the juvenile court to adult criminal court.  They will study the direct file process in Florida through which prosecutors make these determinations without affording the juvenile a hearing on the all-important transfer issue.  Winick is at work on a therapeutic jurisprudence critique of this process that suggests that providing the juvenile a hearing on the transfer issue would promote rehabilitation, and he hopes to conduct empirical research probing the impact of a hearing in this area.  Winick and Perlmutter also were instrumental in using therapeutic jurisprudence analysis to convince the Florida Supreme Court to adopt a hearing procedure when juveniles in foster care are transferred to state mental hospitals or residential treatment centers, and they hope to conduct empirical research on the impact of such hearings.  Such research will be conducted with affiliated scholars from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and the School of Education, and grants will be sought to fund such research. 

Funds will be sought to sponsor several law students as Therapeutic Jurisprudence Scholars each year to assist Professor Winick in the work of the Center and in conducting therapeutic jurisprudence research.  Funds also will be sought to fund several therapeutic jurisprudence scholars from other divisions within the University, who would conduct independent research under the supervision of Professor Winick and other Center faculty.  In addition, consideration will be given to establishing an LLM program in Therapeutic Jurisprudence at the law school, in which students will study and conduct research under the supervision of Professor Winick and other Center faculty.  Funds also will be sought to sponsor several post-doctorate positions for post-doctoral students in psychology, sociology, public health, psychiatry, and other fields, who wish to spend a year in residence studying with and conducting independent research under the supervision of Professor Winick and other Center Faculty.