Linda Tashbook, author of Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law: A Practical Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2019), has been a law librarian at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law for more than twenty years. For all of that time, she has also had a pro bono law practice representing individual clients in disability claims and consumer matters and establishing and consulting for non-profit organizations. In 2008, she created The Homeless Law Blog which she continues to manage. This combination of work earned her the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s Pro Bono Award in 2011.

She was drawn to law school and to working with people experiencing poverty and mental illness as a young public librarian at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh where she provided outreach to public housing communities and, with a literacy agency called Beginning with Books, developed reading rooms and services at all of the family homeless shelters in Western Pennsylvania.

At the University of Pittsburgh, she chairs the Mental Wellness Task Force and previously chaired the University Senate Committee on Benefits and Welfare. In the community, she is a volunteer attorney with Project H.E.L.P., Vice President of NAMI FAMILIAS Pittsburgh East, and a member of the SOS Pittsburgh committee at Jewish Family and Community Service. She was inspired to write Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law: A Practical Handbook by her encounters with consumers of mental health services and their families and caseworkers over the years.

See her author video for Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law: A Practical Handbook. And here are her interview on WESA Radio and a short conversation on the University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s YouTube channel. Contact her at authorlindatashbook@gmail.com.