Handbook of Forensic Assessment

Robert Leslie Sadoff was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 8, 1936. He received two bachelor's degrees and a medical degree from the University of Minnesota. He interned at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles and did his residency at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a master's degree in psychiatry. He served in the Army as a courts-martial psychiatrist while earning 33 credits at Temple University's law school.

He was a founder of modern forensic psychiatry who assessed the mental competence or emotional states of as many as 10,000 plaintiffs and defendants in court proceedings. He wrote, co-wrote or edited several books including Ethical Issues in Forensic Psychiatry: Minimizing Harm. He was one of the original eight members of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. He joined the University of Pennsylvania medical faculty in 1972 and retired as a clinical professor and director of the Center for Studies in Socio-Legal Psychiatry in 2016. He and his wife produced two documentaries on the American civil rights movement. He died from complications of pancreatic cancer on April 17, 2017 at the age of 81.

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