Eric Janus is the Stephen B. and Lisa S. Bonner Distinguished Chair, and President and Dean, of the William Mitchell College of Law.

Professor Janus has focused his scholarship on the interaction of law with psychiatry and other health sciences. In particular he has devoted much attention to state use of civil commitment to protect public safety. His interests also extend to other coercive preventive interventions, such as quarantine and terrorism-related preventive confinement. His most recent book is Failure to Protect: America’s Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State (Cornell University Press, 2009) and Sexual Predators: Society, Risk and the Law (Routledge, forthcoming June 2015, with R. Prentky and H. Barbaree). He has served on the Minnesota Sex Offender Civil Commitment Advisory Task Force and is a Contributing Editor to the Sex Offender Law Report.