Podcast: Marisol Orihuela Fights for Mental Health Justice

Since her days as a Yale Law School student, Clinical Professor of Law Marisol Orihuela ’08 has been fueled by a passion to use the law for social change. In this episode of Inside Yale Law School⁴, she talks with Dean Heather K. Gerken about leading a new clinic focused on mental health justice, how mental health and criminal justice are intertwined, and the importance of decompressing during stressful times.

Download the transcript⁷

Marisol Orihuela⁸ joined the Law School faculty in 2016 and received tenure in 2023 when she was named Clinical Professor of Law. She leads the Mental Health Justice Clinic and teaches in the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic. Prior to returning to Yale, she was a deputy federal public defender in Los Angeles and a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Why mental health matters in criminal defense (19:43⁹)

As a public defender, Orihuela often represented clients with mental health conditions, which spurred her interest in working on these issues:

“So much of criminal defense involves mental health, mental disability issues, there’s just a huge, disproportionate number of people with mental health conditions in the criminal system. And it was true that I never felt there was a ton of training around mental health issues. I kind of had to train myself or seek it out once I started representing people…”

How understanding trauma helped reunite families (14:37¹⁰)

In 2018, Orihuela and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic¹¹ represented two children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and sent to a detention facility in Connecticut. The clinic successfully sued to reunite the families by bringing a disability rights claim on behalf of the children, based on the trauma they had suffered from the separation.

“Just understanding what is happening to these families not just as a constitutional issue but also as an issue of potential disability, that is, in and of itself, I think an extremely meaningful thing to bring to the forefront. And I was so proud that that was something that we were able to do.”

Read more:

WIRAC Mobilizes to Reunite Families¹²

How her new mental health justice clinic fills a need (25:12¹³)

In 2023, Orihuela launched the Mental Health Justice Clinic to serve the legal needs of people with mental disabilities in Connecticut. Prior to starting the clinic, she conducted nearly a year of research and community needs assessments:

“We do work both in the civil system and the criminal system. That's one of the themes that came out in the community needs assessment, which I was thrilled about because it also lined up with what I thought was interesting to expose the students to, which was how civil and criminal legal systems really intersect ... So someone comes out of prison, they're trying to re-establish their life. If they don’t have supports, it’s very hard for them to do so, [with] higher instances of recidivism. So we try to get people set up with services that might really help them.”

Watch:

Professor Marisol Orihuela on Clinical Work in Criminal Justice, Mental Health, and More¹⁴

Topics

01:32¹⁵  Her experiences as a YLS student

05:47¹⁶ Teaching in the Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic

07:32¹⁷  Her career at the ACLU and as a federal public defender

10:06¹⁸  Winning a nationwide injunction against the travel ban from majority-Muslim countries

14:37¹⁰  Winning a family separation case 

20:50¹⁹  Her toughest case representing a client with mental illness

25:12¹³ The work of the Mental Health Justice Clinic

29:28²⁰  The “tap on the shoulder” in her career

33:29²¹  Helping her students handle difficult cases

37:23²²  The importance of decompressing