High Praise

Justice Anthony Kennedy Applauds Prof. Elyn Saks

-By Gilien Silsby

Cert petitions can wait. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy may try to squeeze in one last summer read – namely USC Gould Professor Elyn Saks’ award winning memoir.

Kennedy’s interest in Saks’ book, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness,” came after she delivered a recent talk on mental illness and the law at the 2015 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in San Diego. Saks spoke about her struggle with schizophrenia, and her work to dispel stigma associated with mental illness.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Elyn Saks at the 2015 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference

After her presentation, Kennedy remarked to the crowd that he planned to read her book.

“It was an honor to speak at this conference and share my thoughts,” Saks said. “I think we can make an impactful change on how we treat people with mental illness who find themselves in the courts and the prisons and who make contact with law enforcement… I was thrilled to meet Justice Kennedy, and I was touched that he was interested in my story.”

The annual conference is attended by more than 350 judges and 200 members of the bar from the western region, which Kennedy oversees.

Saks, a MacArthur Genius Award winner, said she wrote “The Center Cannot Hold” to be free of the secret she had kept for so long and to dispel myths about mental illness.

Although Saks enjoyed a lifetime of academic success — she was valedictorian at Vanderbilt University, at the top of her class at Yale Law School, a Marshall scholar at Oxford, and today is a respected legal scholar – she also has battled schizophrenia since she was a young girl.

“I wanted to write this book to give hope to people who suffer from schizophrenia and understanding to people who don’t,” said Saks, director of the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics at USC Gould.