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Amy Neustein and attorney Michael Lesher are
co-authors of From Madness To Mutiny: Why Mothers
Are Running from the Family Courts—and What Can Be Done about
It. The book was published in 2005 by Northeastern
University Press/University Press of New England, ISBN 1-58465-462-7,
in their Gender, Crime and Law series, with a Foreword by Raoul Felder.
This book, popularly called M2M by growing numbers of readers, sold out 90% of its initial print run in the first three months. It’s been snapped up by over 230 university libraries across the country, from Yale and Princeton to Stanford and UC, at Israel's Bar-Ilan University Law School and Tel Aviv University Law Library, in Canada at McGill, the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia, and even in South Africa and at three universities in Australia.
What makes this well-documented book so popular among mothers, mental health professionals, and lawyers? Amy Neustein has hit a nerve. All too often family courts turn against the very parent who tries to protect the child from abuse. Mothers know this and so do the professionals who work in the court system. To address this, Amy Neustein and Michael Lesher have combined sociology, legal scholarship, and painstaking research, to produce a rigorously documented, lucidly written j’accuse of America’s family court and child welfare system.
Amy Neustein's passion for reform of the family courts stems from her own personal tragedy. After losing her six-year-old daughter to the family court system in 1986, Amy turned to activism. In an interview with the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, Amy declared “I have no other agenda in my life than saving my daughter.” So when the system tried to silence her, as it had so many others, it failed miserably. Amy is a sociologist, who could take the measure of a disgraceful travesty and bring it out into the light of scientific inquiry. She is a mother, who never stopped caring about what happened to her daughter. Amy went on to co-author From Madness To Mutiny, a book intended to help all of the mothers and children who are betrayed by the institutionalized brutality of the system that was mandated to protect them.
From the Foreword by matrimonial attorney Raoul Felder:
What I have seen as a practitioner, this book reveals in punishing detail… Neustein and Lesher ... believe that until the system is reformed and rethought at every level, it will continue to be a dangerous one -- dangerously malfunctioning, dangerously betraying its critical task.
Professor Maureen Therese Hannah, Siena College:
A groundbreaking new book that is perhaps the most highly readable scholarly work I've encountered in my 14 years in academia ... The very first to provide the historical and contextual chronology of this system's steady decline into chaos and corruption over the past two decades. It is eminently accurate and rigorously documented -- a book that will hit scholars, professionals, and lay persons right between their eyes. This is the book that mothers have been waiting for ... I consider this book among the most important of the decade.
Randy Burton, Esq., former Texas prosecutor:
From Madness to Mutiny offers an unexpurgated view of our nation's criminally dysfunctional family court system.
Professor Kathleen Coulborn Faller, School of Social Work, University of Michigan:
This book describes how systems and professionals fail sexually abused children… Neustein and Lesher champion these children and their mothers and intend that their voices will be heard and heeded.
Lee Grant, child advocate and award-winning actress:
A book for all mothers crushed by an unfair system.
Professor Daniel Pollack, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University:
From Madness to Mutiny is a book whose ... effect is to jolt us with an illuminating barrage of riveting descriptions, information, commentary and philosophy.
From the Foreword by Margaret B. Drew, JD, LLM,
Associate Professor of Law, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Law: I am pleased to write the foreword to the
second edition of From Madness to Mutiny. I practiced family law for
twenty-five years before transitioning to academia, where I continue
my representation of abuse survivors. This second edition provides
comprehensive case studies of what happens in court to protective mothers.
These narrative case histories need to be taught in law school...
This second edition of From Madness to Mutiny offers valuable information
that attorneys for protective mothers need to know, and that law students need to learn. Robert Geffner, PhD, ABPP, ABN, Founding President, Family Violence & Sexual Assault Institute (FVSAI): In this second edition of From Madness to Mutiny,
Amy Neustein and Michael Lesher follow up on their first book, highlighting many
of these issues and research findings that have come to the fore in the past twenty
years since their first edition was published.... This excellent book ties together the
controversies, issues, and the use of pseudoscience, and shows what has happened
to far too many women and children in family court cases when there are verifiable
allegations of abusive behaviors.
FROM MADNESS TO MUTINY 2nd Edition is now a
#1 New Release
in Parental & Juvenile Family Law (pdf here)
and in Children & Family Law (pdf here) on Amazon and top of the Amazon Hot
New Releases page. The second edition is published by
Oxford University Press
and is currently available at a 30% discount with
this flyer.
Home •
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Childless Mother
Second Edition
published in 2025
Daughter of Famous Rabbi —
Lord of War (starring Nicolas Cage) Filmed at her Father’s Synagogue in 2005
I Think of My Ancestor’s Manhattan Murder As Time Ticks for Jews —
Newsweek (“My Turn” Column)
Justice: Fixing the World, Fixing Ourselves —
Jewish Life
Amy Neustein: Commentary on Jewish Society and Leadership
— JNS.org
Women in Science UN Campaign
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