NOTE: This CLE requires separate registration at this link! There is a $50 fee for this CLE and the DJC is accepting payment in the form of check made out to "Disability Justice Committee of the NLG" to be given either in-person or mailed. For the mailing address, kindly reach out to frishberga@aol.com."
Disability rights and justice are urgently relevant to all fights for civil rights and social justice. In this CLE session, the lawyers and legal workers of NLG’s Disability Justice Committee and allied comrades will provide critical frameworks, updates and observations from the field, and advocacy tools to apply critical disability legal analysis and anti-ableism/disability justice activism to our work. Three panels will include presentations and time for discussion to address three thematic areas: (1) education, family regulation systems, and government services; (2) housing, employment, and disability antidiscrimination; and (3) alternatives to law and creative movement lawyering in the current political and pandemic moment.
Education, Family Regulation Systems, and Government Services Cristal Robinson, Nesta Johnson, Rebecca Hoyt, and Sam Adams
Housing, Employment, and Disability Antidiscrimination Aaron Frishberg, Lydia X. Z. Brown, Rebecca Hoyt, and Sam Adams
Alternatives to Law and Creative Movement LawyeringChris Lombardi, Nesta Johnson, Ren Wilcox, and Jilisa Milton (invited)
All Speaker Bios
Aaron Frishberg has been a member of the National Lawyers Guild since college, over forty years ago, and helped revive the dormant national committee which is now known as the Disability Justice Committee. Aaron also sits on the steering committee of the national Military Law Task Force. He has lived and practiced in New York City all of his professional life, and has strong friendships with members of National Conference of Black Lawyers, including its first National Director, who had him do legal research for his law firm beginning when he was in the City College Urban Legal Studies program, better known to many NLG members as "Haywood's program." He spent his post law school years initially doing legal research and drafting for a Harlem civil rights law firm, and spent four years at what is now the Mental Health Law Project of Mobilization for Justice, providing out-patient psychiatric patients with legal representation. He has spent the next several decades doing civil rights representation of people with disabilities and others in employment, housing, and transportation discrimination as well as representing people seeking release from psychiatric institutions.
Chris Lombardi has been writing about war and peace for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ABA Journal, and at
whyy.org. She is the author of the 2020 book, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars,” from the New Press.
Lydia X. Z. Brown (they/them) is a feminist disability studies and critical legal studies scholar. Currently they are Assistant Teaching Professor of Disability Studies at Georgetown University. They are also the Law and Public Policy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) program at the Georgetown University Medical Center. Brown’s work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation; carcerality and institutional violence; asexuality as queerness; algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice; and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. They have recent publications in FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Autism in Adulthood, The American Journal of Law and Medicine, Critical Sociology, Critical Studies in Education, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Professionally, Brown is Director of Public Policy at the National Disability Institute, which works to advance economic opportunity and freedom for people with disabilities. They are also the founding Executive Director of The Autistic People of Color Fund, which advocates for disability, racial, and economic justice with a focus on building generative economies and just transition while providing mutual aid, peer support, and community-funded reparations. Brown serves as immediate past president and vice chair of the Disability Rights Bar Association and as a member of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Executive Committee, and was a past member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights. They previously led the nation’s only project focused on disability rights, AI, and tech policy at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Tech Law & Policy and later at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Brown is also a former Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, where they represented students with disabilities facing denial of civil rights in education, and former Chairperson of the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council.
Nesta Johnson joined the National Center for Lesbian Rights as a staff attorney in 2020, continuing a career focused on advocating for the rights of children and families. Nesta graduated in 2008 with a BA from Stony Brook University, where she majored in Philosophy. In 2013, Nesta was awarded her JD from the George Washington University Law School, where she did clinical work in medical torts, domestic violence advocacy, and family law. During her five-year tenure as a staff attorney with The Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice, Nesta represented over seven hundred children in primarily “child welfare” matters. Subsequently, as a writing/appellate staff attorney with The Children’s Law Center, Nesta advocated for youth at the trial and appellate levels in primarily custody and visitation matters. As an LGBTQ+ family law attorney at NCLR, Nesta works at the intersections of LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, economic justice, and disability justice to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ parents, parents of LGBTQ+ children, and single and multi-parent families through legislative and policy advocacy, public and professional education, and impact litigation. Nesta advocates for expanding equitable access to reproductive health care while safeguarding the health and rights of people acting as surrogates and gamete donors, and works to ensure that LGBTQ+ parents and their children are fully recognized and respected as families under the law regardless of genetic connection or marital status. Nesta is admitted to practice law in New York State and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Hoyt joins the City of Madison as the Disability Rights and Services Specialist. As a person with a disability, and the parent of a child with a disability, she brings with her deep roots and passion for advocacy. She is committed to celebrating diversity and representing the disability community with pride. Rebecca joins the Equity and Social Justice (ESJ) Division, within the Department of Civil Rights. Rebecca worked as an education advocate at Public Counsel Law Center, representing students and families in special education and school discipline matters. For the last 14 years she worked at Disability Rights California (DRC), the largest disability rights legal services program in the country. As a Senior Advocate at DRC, she strove to preserve and advance educational and employment opportunities through research, policy analysis, advocacy, and coalition buildin
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