Why did you decide to switch career paths from psychology researcher to law school?
Like many late-diagnosed autistic people, I knew growing up that my brain worked differently from other people’s. Most of my friends also were either autistic or had other developmental or mental health disabilities. In college, I already knew that what I wanted to do was help other people like me, and at the time I thought that that would be through research in psychology.
After college, I worked at a developmental psychology research lab at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the perks of the job was that I could take classes, and I sat in on a class on mental health law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I came to realize that a lot of the challenges that I was most motivated to address – like discrimination and threats to autonomy – were best addressed through law and policy, not research. I scrapped my plans to get a PhD, applied to law schools and never looked back!
How has your lived experience as an autistic individual shaped your journey in the legal profession?
This is such a hard question to answer because my work as a lawyer has been so varied, but overall, I would say the biggest impact has been how it informs my disability advocacy. When I’m working directly with clients with disabilities, I find that it helps me build rapport and even makes me a better communicator. I understand better where my clients are coming from and can more easily identify and correct misunderstandings. When I’m working on policy issues, my lived experience helps me understand how policies and practices would be experienced by the community I’m advocating for.
There’s a stereotype that autistic people are generally drawn to STEM fields and that law is an anomalous profession for us to go into, but in my experience that is not true. I have known and worked with quite a few openly autistic lawyers. Many went into fields like academia or technical areas of the law where they could do the types of detailed analysis that played to their strengths, while others ended up in fields like litigation or client-focused work as well.
You have over 15 years of experience in disability law and policy, including senior roles at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and Quality Trust for Individuals with Disabilities. You are currently an independent consultant on disability law and policy, accessibility, and employment issues. You also serve on several boards, including as Board Chair of the ASAN and Board Member of Not Dead Yet. What sorts of projects are you currently working on for these organizations and in your consulting?
I made the transition to independent consulting less than a year ago, and the thing I like best about it is that it gives me the flexibility to take on lots of different projects and set my own pace. I’ve developed training and technical assistance materials on employment for people with disabilities, helped organize policy advocacy convenings for self-advocates, and even supported a legal team that was struggling to communicate effectively with a disabled client. But I also appreciate the opportunity to keep my toe in disability policy through my involvement in ASAN and Not Dead Yet – especially in these challenging times.
You spent a significant portion of your career at ASAN—more than 8 years. How was working at a self-advocacy organization different from working at an advocacy organization? Why was that important to you?
ASAN was founded in response to the paternalistic attitudes a lot of nonprofits have historically had towards the people they were supposed to be advocating for. Those attitudes are far from universal, and I think they’re changing a lot for the better, even in organizations that aren’t led by self-advocates. But even so, it was incredibly refreshing to work at ASAN. The autistic community is incredibly diverse, and its members have a wide range of needs, and ASAN is remarkable in its commitment to centering the voices of its community members across that full range.
Professionally, ASAN was also remarkable in its commitment to inclusion in the workplace. Accommodations that I’d have to fight for elsewhere were just granted as a matter of course, because leadership often had the same accommodation needs themselves.
What role does the law play in disability advocacy?
A lot of what I do lately is more policy advocacy than legal advocacy, but law is a key policy enforcement tool. During the beginning of the COVID pandemic, for example, many hospitals would not let people with disabilities bring supporters along with them when they sought care. This led to chaotic and even dangerous situations in which people who had significant communication disabilities were alone in the hospital, without someone to provide detailed medical information to medical staff or help patients communicate their needs. People with mental health and memory disabilities were alone without people who were familiar to them who could help them stay oriented. This was both a policy issue – because this kind of policy can lead to bad care – and a legal issue – because it amounted to a failure to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.
When you’re addressing a problem like that, you want to use whatever tool gets the job done fastest. In that case, it was filing discrimination complaints with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights. In other circumstances, the best way to achieve change may be through litigation, regulatory advocacy, or legislative advocacy. In each circumstance it really helps to have enough legal background to understand what kinds of change are possible through each of those avenues, how enforceable any new changes are, and how vulnerable those changes will be to reversal as political realities shift.
What advice would you give to disability advocates? Aspiring lawyers with disabilities?
To new disability advocates, I would urge people to learn the history of the movement, cultivate mentors, and develop cross-movement connections. Disability advocacy can’t happen in a vacuum. Policing reform is a good example here – from time to time we see horrific cases where people with disabilities are hurt or even killed by police. Often, police mistake people with disabilities for being under the influence of substances, noncompliant with orders that they don’t understand, or “erratic” and potentially dangerous. Other times, someone is having a medical or mental health emergency and police are sent to the scene instead of medical staff.
But this is not a problem that can be effectively addressed without collaborating with other civil rights movements that focus on police reform and accountability, including racial justice movements. Without that kind of collaboration, there’s a real risk that people will come up with solutions that would not be effective or might even cause unintended harm to people with disabilities who are at heightened risk of negative interactions with police – such as people of color and people in highly policed areas. That’s just one example of well-intended advocacy that can have negative effects when people don’t know the history of the movement and don’t do cross-disability and cross-movement work.
For aspiring lawyers with disabilities, I would again say to cultivate mentors and peers who are also lawyers with disabilities. There are still people in our field who feel like we should just be able to get over any challenge. That often doesn’t work for people with disabilities – we need to figure out how we work best, not try to fit into predetermined ideas of how lawyers are supposed to operate.