Linda G. Mills JD, MSW, PhD
Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and University Life
Professor of Social Work, Public Policy and Law
linda.mills@nyu.edu | (212) 998-2306
bio
For more than two decades, Linda G. Mills has explored the intersection of social work and law in the courtroom, classroom and community. Her work has influenced policy and practice in the areas of law and emotion, intimate abuse and alternative responses to traumatic events, both nationally and internationally.
In 1984, Mills was one of the first public interest lawyers to start a not-for-profit, The Hawkins Center of Law and Services for People with Disabilities. The center was inspired by Versie Hawkins, a client who told Mills that the letters she had received from Social Security denying her disability benefits had caused her to feel worthless and suicidal. At a loss for what to say or do, Mills realized that lawyers needed to tune into the emotional aspects of their clients' lives and to the unconscious psychological dimensions of legal practice. Mills then raised $110,000 to found the center. Since 1984, it has helped more than 15,000 people cope with emotional and legal challenges related to their disabilities and successfully represented more than 4,000 people on their Social Security disability claims. This experience also prompted Mills to train as a social worker, thus launching her journey into the legal psyche.
First at UCLA and now at NYU, Mills teaches both social work and law students together in a rigorous interdisciplinary undertaking. As a professor of social work, public policy and law, Mills helps students to cross professional boundaries by illuminating what the "other" is trained to accept and reject. Professor Mills is a passionate teacher and was nominated in 2001 by NYU's social work students for the Most Distinguished Teaching Medal.
In her practice and her scholarship, Professor Mills has become a leading advocate of legal training and intervention that is conscious of and sensitive to emotional context, race and gender. Her theory of "affective advocacy" is derived from her practice as a public interest lawyer and combines emotional and legal responses to address "the whole person." In her scholarship on judicial bias-and especially in her book, A Penchant for Prejudice-Mills documents how emotion can never be disentangled from the process of judging. Instead of eradicating emotional bias, efforts should be made to identify emotion's unconscious effects on judging and to make apparent what is usually acted out unseen. Mills's scholarship on bias has been recognized and cited by all levels of the judiciary.
Professor Mills's theory of affective advocacy is central to her critique of mandatory arrest and prosecution policies for domestic offenses. In Harvard Law Review, Mills argues that mandatory interventions reject, degrade and isolate the victim in a manner that mirrors the battering relationship. Mills was a keynote speaker at the 2003 Human Resources Administration Conference, which attracted over 1,000 people.
For five years, Mills was the Principal Investigator of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant that trained over 1,200 Los Angeles child welfare workers in Mills's affective approaches to working with battered women. Mills has also raised funds from such sources as the National Science Foundation and California Social Work Education Center. Additionally, the Leslie Glass Foundation funds a fellowship program in family violence and juvenile justice that Mills oversees at NYU.
Mills is also the recipient of a large Department of Homeland Security grant to assess the effectiveness of New York City police peer support models in addressing trauma among public safety officers responding to terrorist attacks. This study will influence the development of peer support in first responder agencies across the nation.
In her recent book, Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse (Princeton University Press, 2003), Mills proposed a restorative justice approach to domestic violence called "Intimate Abuse Circles." In February 2004, she received funding from the Altria Foundation to hold a roundtable meeting among the nation's eminent domestic violence and restorative justice practitioners to refine this model for implementation. Two models emerged from the roundtable: "Peacemaking Circles," specifically designed for the criminal justice system and adopted by Judge Maley in Arizona (renamed Construyendo Circulos de Paz, or CCPs, by the Arizona community), and "Healing Circles," a community-based, pre-arrest intervention for intimate violence. Mills, in partnership with the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, is developing a Healing Circles program for the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City.
As a result of both the domestic violence and trauma related activities, Mills recently founded the Center on Violence and Recovery, which is dedicated to advancing knowledge about the causes of violence and researching alternative interventions that galvanize people to take an active role in their recovery. Through this approach, the center aims to help rout out entrenched violence and interrupt the transmission of victimization and perpetration from one generation to the next.
A prolific writer, Mills has written three books and published in both of her fields' leading journals, including Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Social Work, Children and Youth Services Review, and Criminal Justice and Behavior. She has highlighted her work as a guest on NPR, The Oprah Show (twice), Bill Moyers' Now, and the O'Reilly Factor and authored editorials for USA Today, The Los Angeles Times (republished in some twenty newspapers nationwide) and Newsday (republished in seven newspapers nationwide). Mills is currently writing a book that explores the conventional myths of intimate abuse.