Joyce Kemp Laben was a nurse educator and attorney with a specialty in psychiatric nursing and an advocate for the mentally ill in the criminal justice system. Ms. Laben was born March 2, 1936 in Elgin, Illinois, and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, the University of California, San Francisco with a Master of Science in Nursing and Suffolk University, Boston, MA with a Juris Doctor degree. She taught at Boston University School of Nursing and spent most of her career at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing where she retired as Professor Emerita in 1998. While on leave from Vanderbilt, at the Tennessee Department of Mental Health in 1972-74, she was instrumental in the development of the modern day Forensic Mental Health System in Tennessee. She died in Nashville, June 30, 2019. She was 83.