Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Han, Eun Hee

What to Learn From Pandemic Teaching? Our Student’s Names

Wilson, Britney

51
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 1 (Fall 2021)
A Body’s Work: On Self and Peer 
Education as a Black Disabled Lawyer
By Britney Wilson
“Years ago, I would’ve sworn there couldn’t even be anybody like you. You’re not natural! 
But you can feel pain—and you can die. Remember that and do your job.” 
—Octavia Butler, Kindred
“Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history 
and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded 
dice.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me 
In the summer of 2020, I watched a webinar on the history of Black 
disabled activism as part of the Crip Camp virtual series, a complement to the 
Netflix documentary of the same name on the history of the disability rights 
movement. While watching, I was surprised to learn about “the ugly laws,” 
municipal ordinances passed in several cities in the wake of the Civil War that 
made it illegal for people with disabilities—specifically “[a]ny person who is 
diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly 
or disgusting object”—to appear in public.1 
I was not surprised that such laws had existed. My life as a Black woman 
with cerebral palsy, now also a civil rights attorney and law professor, has 
taught me never to be surprised at the cruelty or inhumanity of the law. I 
was surprised—but not really surprised—that in three years of law school, and, 
at the time, five years of practicing civil rights law, I had never even heard 
a passing mention of these laws, which the presenter had analogized to Jim 
Crow. I wondered what kind of disabled civil rights lawyer had never heard 
1 SuSan M. Schweik, The ugly lawS: DiSabiliTy in Public (2010); see also Adrienne Phelps 
Coco, Diseased, Maimed, and Mutilated: Categorizations of Disability and an Ugly Law in Late Nineteenth-
Century Chicago, 44 J. Soc. hiSTory 23 (2010); Elizabeth Greiwe, How an ‘ugly law’ stayed on 
Chicago’s books for 93 years, chicago Tribune (June 23, 2016), https://www.chicagotribune.
com/opinion/commentary/ct-ugly-laws-disabilities-chicago-history-flashback-perspec-
0626-md-20160622-story.html. 
Britney Wilson Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Civil Rights and Disability 
Justice Clinic at New York Law School. Her work has appeared in The Nation, on Longreads, and This 
American Life, among other outlets.
 
52 Journal of Legal Education
about Jim Crow-like laws geared toward people with disabilities. However, 
it was not my lack of knowledge about this particular set of laws that really 
bothered me. It was that my lack of knowledge was yet another reminder of 
my struggle to find and learn about my history as a disabled person, and as a 
Black disabled person, despite my deliberate searches, at least in the form of 
my educational and professional paths.
I have said the same thing countless times for as long as I have been 
associated with the legal profession: this was not a career choice for me. Just as 
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up with Type 1 diabetes,2 
described in her autobiography, My Beloved World, “[T] he law for me was not 
a career but a vocation.”3 Had I been born into another body, I would have 
published a poetry collection, a novel, and a memoir by now. I would have 
danced on Broadway. I would have filmed the movie script I wrote when I was 
ten years old. I would have been an R&B background singer. I would have 
been a basketball commentator.
This is not to say that I cannot or will not do those things as a disabled 
person or that disabled people cannot or are not already doing those things. I 
just felt that there was something else my body and the world, and my body in 
this world, had forced me to do. It had forced me to fight to ensure and prove 
that I, and people like me, can and deserve to exist here, and even to thrive. 
Then, there were the constant well-intentioned but harrowing reminders from 
my mother that I did not come from money, and I would not likely be able 
to do many manual labor jobs, so I had better be prepared to make a living 
with my mind. I did not completely understand the inherent ableism of those 
warnings at the time, but they consumed me. It was that sense of necessity and 
purpose that led me to law school and that keeps me in the profession. 
But my sense of purpose often clashed with my reality. I went most of my 
elementary through college education without even hearing about, let alone 
engaging with, the history or existence of people with disabilities. I had spent 
four years fighting for accessibility on my college campus. While lack of 
disability inclusion is not uniquely or singularly a historically Black college 
or university (HBCU) issue, attending an HBCU heightened my sense of 
identity as a disabled person. HBCUs are institutions known for developing 
and catering to historically marginalized groups. However, on most days, 
disability was almost absent from collegiate structure, culture, or concern, 
even as the university bolstered students’ sense of racial history and identity. 
So I was especially hopeful that law school would be a place where I could 
finally learn about and explore my identity as a disabled person, and as a Black 
disabled person. I was repeatedly disappointed. During my time there, no 
disability law class was offered. When I went to the dean of students to inquire 
2 Josh Gerstein & Lorraine Woellert, Sotomayor at work after health scare, PoliTico (Jan. 19, 2018), 
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/19/sonia-sotomayor-health-scare-349971.
3 Sonia SoToMayor, My beloveD worlD 325 (2013).
53A Body’s Work
about one, he said I would need to follow the formal administrative process 
to request one and that they would then need to find a professor to teach it. 
Just as I had in college, I faced accessibility issues in law school. While 
living in university-affiliated housing, I found myself stranded in the early 
hours of the morning as fire alarms went off and there was no plan for the 
evacuation of students with disabilities. I was late to class and forced to 
call building maintenance or seek outside assistance when it snowed and 
accessible pathways had not been cleared. My journal office was inaccessible. 
None of these things surprised me, however, because society tends to follow 
culture. Therefore, if students with disabilities are not seen or thought about 
in the intellectual or curricular space, our physical or personal presence in the 
academic space also cannot be adequately considered. 
I ultimately did not request the disability law class. I probably should have. 
At the time, however, I just could not find the energy for another potential 
fight (or “process”). I was frustrated at the thought of having to request or 
otherwise create a disability class in an environment I thought should be 
designed to include one. That a class on disability would apparently not be 
viewed as equally essential to one’s legal education as corporations or securities 
was distressing to me. I could not imagine a scenario in which the average 
person would ever need to know about the latter, but I knew the opposite 
would be true for most people about the former. 
I vividly remember the few times we discussed disability-related cases or 
topics in my other law school classes. In my first-year constitutional law class, 
for example, I learned that disability discrimination challenges under the 
Equal Protection Clause were subject only to rational basis scrutiny, which 
meant that the government could discriminate against me as long as it could 
articulate a “legitimate interest” in doing so.4 In family law, I learned that 
while courts may not rely solely on a person’s disability to determine parental 
fitness, disability is one of the factors that may be considered and that courts 
may inquire about disabled parents’ actual and potential capabilities when 
making such determinations.5 
In employment discrimination, I finally learned the legal definition of a 
“reasonable accommodation.” It had previously been a seemingly amorphous 
term with an accompanying process that I either had been fumbling my way 
through or had unwittingly forfeited because I did not know I had a right to 
one or how to request one. In my constitutional litigation class, which covered 
litigation in federal courts, I learned about Pennhurst solely in the context of the 
Supreme Court’s ruling on sovereign immunity, the Eleventh Amendment, 
and the circumstances under which state actors can be sued6—not its role as a 
4 City of Cleburne, Texas v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432, 442–43 (1985). 
5 In re Marriage of Carney, 24 Cal. 3d 725 (1979).
6 Pennhurst State Sch. & Hosp. v. Halderman, 465 U.S. 89 (1984). 
54 Journal of Legal Education
seminal disability rights case challenging institutionalization.7 I only recently 
discovered the latter from a New York Times article about one of the Black 
disabled plaintiffs in the case.8 I left law school without ever having been 
formally introduced to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Whatever 
I learned about the ADA came from an internship research assignment or from 
my own reading. 
I have only recently begun to be able to explain the gap between what I 
expected and what I got from my legal education. I wanted to be equipped with 
information to help me navigate my life as a Black disabled person, not just to 
argue a point or to read and analyze a text. I viewed the law as a weapon in the 
fight for social justice. So I wanted concrete, relevant, digestible information 
about what people were entitled to under various laws and across issue areas, 
along with recommended actions they should take if certain situations arose. 
Essentially, I wanted know-your-rights trainings in every class. I think that 
is what most people, particularly people from marginalized groups or those 
not innately familiar with the law, imagine that law school provides. I can tell 
by the questions they ask me now that I am a lawyer. I do not think they are 
wrong to expect that. A practical, concrete approach to legal education would 
necessarily include disability because it would reflect the actual issues people 
face. It would also likely make the legal education experience more accessible 
to actual law students with different types of disabilities.
Instead, I got that education after graduation. I learned about the 
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during my first year of 
legal practice while working on school-to-prison pipeline cases primarily 
categorized by my national nonprofit social justice organization as “racial 
justice” after I emphasized the importance of including students with 
disabilities, and especially students of color with disabilities, in our advocacy. 
I learned about individualized education programs (IEPs) while conducting 
legal research for the case. After I mentioned my newfound discovery of IEPs 
to my mother, she showed me a copy of my own. Suddenly, I understood the 
purpose of the IQ tests and creative games during the doctors’ office visits of 
my childhood. Being Black and disabled, even as a lawyer, has been a never-
ending process of self-education, revelations, and connecting my own dots. 
I have the experience, then I get educated about the experience, often by 
happenstance. I go through something, only to learn afterward how I could 
have prevented it or gotten assistance with it, or the formal reasons behind my 
instinct that it should never have happened to me. As I continue to interrogate 
7 Halderman v. Pennhurst State Sch. & Hosp., 446 F. Supp. 1295, 1298 (E.D. Pa. 1977); 
see also Halderman v. Pennhurst State Sch. & Hosp., 673 F.2d 647, 649 (3d Cir. 1982) (on 
remand from Supreme Court, which overruled its decision holding that the Developmental 
Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act created enforceable rights), subsequent history 
omitted.
8 Glenn Rifkin, Overlooked No More: Roland Johnson, Who Fought to Shut Down Institutions for the 
Disabled, ny TiMeS (July 31, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/obituaries/
roland-johnson-overlooked.html. 
55A Body’s Work
the traditional separation between civil rights and disability rights in practice, 
I realize that that gap may exist in part because many civil rights lawyers have 
also never been formally introduced to disability laws or to how the laws with 
which they may be most familiar specifically impact people with disabilities. 
It is not my intention to offer unduly harsh criticisms of my professors or the 
quality of my legal education. I firmly believe that the true goal of education is 
to prepare people to obtain and evaluate their own information from a variety 
of sources and perspectives. Some degree of self-education will always be 
necessary. From rational basis scrutiny to factors weighed in parental fitness 
determinations, I also believe that each of my professors taught the disability 
case law that they found to be relevant to their respective courses. 
Similarly, I do not mean to suggest that the curricular deficiencies I have 
identified are unique to disability. Many of my observations also apply to 
students from other marginalized backgrounds or identities. They apply to 
students who attend law school in pursuit of social justice goals and careers, 
more broadly. Law school is not very good at incorporating individual identity 
and lived experience in all of its various forms. I learned little more about 
race or the racial context for the concepts we discussed in law school than I 
learned about disability. Such context destroys the illusion of legal formalism 
upon which the model of legal education often depends, the notion that law is 
created in a void, that it is even created at all. 
I think often, particularly in the midst of a pandemic, about how everyone 
would benefit from a truly contextual legal education that is inclusive of 
disability. Such an education might have included a discussion of the “ugly 
laws” in constitutional law in conjunction with a discussion of the Thirteenth, 
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. That discussion would also include 
the circumstances of the passage of both the “ugly laws” and the Reconstruction 
amendments against the backdrop of Reconstruction itself.9 It would also 
explore the contemporaneous passage of the Black Codes10 and examine the 
relationship between post-Civil War sentiments toward people of color and 
people with disabilities who were classified as part of a lower social order, 
segregated, discriminated against, and subjected to endless other atrocities.11 
Students would evaluate how those sentiments are reflected during 
the legislative and judicial pronouncements of that period and reflect 
on comparisons to our current time. Lawyers already trained with those 
considerations are much more likely to understand the overlap of issues in 
both practice and the world, as well as the impact of the overlap of those issues. 
For example, those lawyers would be better equipped to defend their clients 
because they would understand how perceptions of their clients’ intentions, 
9 See Phelps Coco, supra note 1, at 25, 28.
10 Black Codes, hiSTory.coM (June 1, 2010), https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/
black-codes. 
11 See, e.g., City of Cleburne, 473 U.S. at 461–62 (Marshall, J. concurring in the judgment in part, 
dissenting in part).
56 Journal of Legal Education
dangerousness, capabilities, and criminality are informed by both race and 
disability. 
Much of the education I did not get about disability law and history—
especially as it relates to people of color with disabilities—I have gotten from 
my disabled peers and advocates. Many of these teachers I have never even 
met in person. I have interacted with them only virtually. Yet, without them, I 
would barely know where to begin doing my own reading. 
Alice Wong has basically created her own university highlighting the 
work, art, and diversity of the disability community.12 Dustin Gibson,13 T.L. 
Lewis,14 and Cyree Jarelle Johnson15 have given me historical context and a 
macro-framework and understanding for how ableism intersects with racism, 
patriarchy, and capitalism. Vilissa Thompson has taught me.16 Keah Brown has 
taught me.17 Matthew Cortland18 and Rebecca Cokley19 have kept me updated 
on legislation and policy that is essential to the disability community’s needs 
and interests. I learned so much from the virtual Crip Camp series. I could add 
so many more names, contributions, and lessons to this list, but I often wonder 
where I would be if I had not found these people and resources myself. I 
wonder about the people who may never find them, especially the people 
being trained to serve the populations they represent. 
While virtual learning from my disabled peers has been invaluable, and, 
undoubtedly the best method, they need to be on the syllabus. Disability 
deserves its rightful place in the legal curriculum, because no matter how 
skilled some people may be at connecting the dots, true access means providing 
everyone with the complete picture.
12 See About, DiSabiliTy viSibiliTy ProJecT, https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/about/ (last 
visited Nov. 11, 2020).
13 See DuSTin P. gibSon, https://www.dustinpgibson.com (last visited Nov. 11, 2020). 
14 See Talila a. lewiS, https://www.talilalewis.com/about.html (last visited Nov. 11, 2020). 
15 Cyree Jarelle Johnson, A Paradoxical History of Black Disease, DiSabiliTy 
viSibiliTy ProJecT (May 14, 2020), https://disabilityvisibilityproject.
com/2020/05/14/a-paradoxical-history-of-black-disease/. 
16 See raMP your voice, https://www.vilissathompson.com (last visited on Nov. 11, 2020). 
17 See Keah Brown, https://keahbrown.com (last visited Nov. 11, 2020).
18 See, e.g., Matthew Cortland, Talk PoverTy, https://talkpoverty.org/person/matthew-
cortland/ (last visited Nov. 11, 2020). 
19 See Rebecca Cokley, ForD FounDaTion, https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/people/
rebecca-cokley/ (last visited July 6, 2021). 


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