Today’s unprecedented health, social, and economic challenges raised by the coronavirus pandemic require a retrospective, present-day, and prospective view of U.S. employment policy for individuals with disabilities. Over the next five years, the goal of the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) on “Disability Inclusive Employment Policy” (DIEP) will be to design and implement a series of studies that produce new data and evidence on policy levers to increase employment rates of persons with disabilities with the objective of informing current and future policy and program development. Continue Reading

Professor Peter Blanck, chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute and lead author of the study, said “the longer-term objective (of the study) is to help measurably enhance the professional lives of lawyers and others in the profession by understanding and mitigating pernicious sources of attitudinal stigma and structural bias.”

Lawyers who either identify as having disabilities or who identify as LGBTQ+ report experiencing both subtle and overt forms of discrimination at their workplaces, with common reports of subtle but unintentional biases. The findings come from a new national study released today by the American Bar Association, in collaboration with the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University. Continue Reading

New York, NY: On Friday, September 25, at 4 p.m. the Disability Allied Law Students Association (DALSA) at the New York University School of Law virtually hosted Dr. Peter Blanck to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Dr. Blanck’s address  reflected on the current state of disability law in the U.S., with a particular focus on COVID-19, and intersections with criminal justice, poverty, and race.
Read the full address here
View the recordings here
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The shift to online instruction for schools across the United States has exposed troubling gaps in digital access and accessibility, especially for low income students and students with disabilities. Schools now face the difficult task of re-imagining what instruction will look like in the future. Continue Reading

What better way to celebrate the 30th ADA anniversary than with the “chief architect” of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Lex Frieden.  Mr. Frieden is a well-known disability rights activist and a leader in the independent living movement.  He is a professor of biomedical informatics and rehabilitation at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He also directs the Independent Living Research Utilization (ILRU) program at TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, home of the Southwest ADA Center, one of ten regional ADA centers in the ADA National Network.  From 2002 until 2006, he served by appointment of President George W. Bush as Chairman of the National Council on Disability (NCD). Continue Reading

Our purpose is to convene the top law schools in the nation working on disability inclusiveness, accessibility, and campus climate to share ideas and resources, identify existing challenges and barriers, and ultimately form a taskforce that works toward a more disability inclusive future in legal education. We seek to deepen our conversations on the intersection of disability and race with particular attention to (1) how ableism and racism function together; (2) racial disparities in COVID-19 that impact our students of color; (3) race-based trauma; and, (4) the need to combat anti-blackness in disability advocacy. Continue Reading

Wednesday – July 1, 2020
ADA30 – Celebrate. Learn. Share.  The ground-breaking civil rights law, the Americans with Disabilities Act, turns thirty in 2020.  What better way to celebrate than a conversation with the chief sponsor of the ADA bill in the House of Representatives, the Honorable Tony Coelho.

Mr. Coelho is a lifelong advocate for the rights of people with disabilities and as someone with a disability who has faced discrimination, Tony shares his unique perspective on how the ADA has made an impact in the lives of people with disabilities.  Mr. Coelho has had a distinguished career as a Congressman including serving as Chair of the President’s Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities from 1994 until 2001. He currently serves as Chairman of the Epilepsy Foundation. Continue Reading