Seaver College Professor Kate Bonnici Bridges the Gap Between Mental Health and Law with Upcoming Book
To ensure equitable legal outcomes for individuals with mental health concerns, Kate Bonnici, assistant professor of English and director of the Social Action and Justice Colloquium at Pepperdine Univeristy, and Diomaris Safi, director of the Justice in Criminal Neuropsychology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), are editing a new book, Mental Health in Criminal Justice: A Practical Guide for Legal and Clinical Professionals to be published by the American Bar Association (ABA).
By pairing leading experts in law and psychology, the book aims to resolve the disconnect between the two fields with the intent of becoming a valuable resource for legal professionals and mental health practitioners, as well as for law professors and students. In addition to the book’s introduction, Bonnici will be coauthoring two chapters, “Teaching Mental Health in Law School: Challenges and Opportunities” and “Litigating Criminal Intent.”
“We decided to create a resource to help both lawyers and mental health providers better understand each other’s work in order to serve the ends of justice,” says Bonnici. “In curating an edited volume, we determined which topics would be useful and applicable to a range of areas and to different levels of expertise and which experts in the field might write to these topics. Nearly all the chapters have an interdisciplinary flavor, so we were able to speak across the siloed boundaries between law and medicine.”
As part of their research, Bonnici and Safi sought to understand the impasse between legal and mental health education. With the assistance of Pepperdine student researchers Eleanor Arena and Asta Wylie, the team compiled a comprehensive list of ABA-accredited law schools nationwide, requesting information as to how criminal law professors incorporated mental health topics into their curriculum, if at all.
“The data we analyzed supports that most aspiring lawyers have little practical training in identifying psychiatric or neurocognitive disorders, which can decrease the quality of representation and lead to unfair, even tragic, outcomes,” explains Bonnici. “The lawyer representing an accused person needs to know something of these intervening factors, because they could influence litigation choices.”
After earning her BA at Harvard University and her JD from New York University, Bonnici practiced law for ten years in California and in Alabama before shifting her career to teaching rhetoric, professional writing, and poetry. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and a PhD in English from UCLA. Blending poetry with scholarly research, Bonnici’s most recent book, A True and Just Record, examines the early modern English witch trials and how those legal experiences were rhetorically conveyed, drawing upon her diverse professional and academic areas of expertise.
With Mental Health in Criminal Justice: A Practical Guide for Legal and Clinical Professionals, Bonnici will continue contributing to the academy with her distinct interdisciplinary perspective while also driving practical reforms within American legal systems and education. On February 11, 2026, Bonnici will deliver a lecture presenting current research entitled Minding Justice: Mental Health and Criminal Law as part of the W. David Baird Distinguished Lecture Series held in the Surfboard Room at Payson Library.
“It's been rewarding to fold in my earlier areas of practice with current areas of intellectual inquiry,” says Bonnici. “I believe this work supports Pepperdine’s mission of truly caring for the world around us and trying to figure out how I can best use my training in service to others for the sake of justice.”