Reimagining Access to Clinical and Experiential Legal Education: Supporting Disabled Students with a Disability Justice Framework

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Majestic B

Floor: Second Floor, Conference Plaza

“Disability Justice [is] an honoring of the long standing legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform.”
—PATTY BERNE (2015)

Clinical and experiential legal education offers many law students with disabilities an opportunity to thrive in learning environments that prioritize student autonomy. However, far too often, experiential learning courses replicate law schools’ existing barriers to access. Furthermore, legal educators may receive inadequate institutional training to support disabled students or remain unaware of the ableism that infiltrates our normative course design. University-required accommodations processes provide students with the bare minimum needed to participate in experiential courses – sometimes far less than the same law student will be entitled to in future employment.

This session builds on the lessons learned at a community gathering on the same topic at the 2023 AALS Clinical Conference. This session will: 1) offer a brief history on educational ableism and the underlying forms of white supremacy; 2) present a disability justice framework for increasing access to experiential learning; 3) explore the pedagogical lessons learned by our 2023 AALS Clinical Conference gathering attendees; and 4) hold deliberative space for attendees to reflect on resources and tools we can use to advance principles of disability justice in future experiential learning courses, proactively reduce ableist barriers, and increase the accessibility of law school as a learning environment.

Drawing on our lived and learned experiences in legal education, we will touch on barriers disabled law students must overcome to participate meaningfully in seminar, supervision, and case-handling or advocacy work. In dreaming of inclusive and freedom-based classrooms, we invite participants to join the broader disability justice movement by unimagining our law schools’ ableist infrastructure.