The majority of AJA members likely do not know Professor David Wexler. Academics and sitting judges have a fairly poor way of communicating with each other. But he was, and remains, an important scholar in an area judges care deeply about. Michael L. Perlin (New York Law School) has posted ‘Changing of the Guards’: David Wexler, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article – a tribute to Professor David Wexler – explores how and why the idea of therapeutic jurisprudence first came to him, traces its early development, and contextualizes it in the changes in modern mental disability law in the 1980s. It then sketches out the core principles of this school of legal thought, and considers its expansion beyond mental disability law, both substantively (as it was applied to other areas of the law, some related to mental disability law, and some totally different), procedurally (considerations of how therapeutic jurisprudence methodologies could restructure all of the legal system, including the role of courts, legislatures, administrative agencies and lawyers), and professionally (as others beyond lawyers began to embrace it). Finally, it speculates as to the future, using as its fulcrum the just-created International Society of Therapeutic Jurisprudence.​