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"AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." BEGIN TRANSCRIPT STEPHANIE ENYART: I think we're going to go ahead and get started now. Hopefully you all have handouts. We put four stacks on the comers and we also have electronic versions if you would like us to send you an electronic version. You can either start a sheet or just bring us your contact information at the end of the presentation. So I'll go ahead and start off. My name is Stephanie Enyart and this panel is very, very exciting for us. The National Association of Law Students with Disabilities is really happy to share the floor at a conference like this. It's something that we hope we will do in the future as well. To start things off, I think that we're just going to briefly introduce ourselves. Unfortunately, one of our panelists had a personal emergency which made her unavailable to come today, so we're going to be filling in as best we can with what she would have shared. If we're looking at our notes a little more than usual, that may be why. I'm going to go ahead and start with myself. My name is Stephanie Enyart. I have a visual disability. It's a form of macular degeneration that starts very early; for me, when I was fifteen. So I have transitioned from being a visual learner to being more of a blend of an auditory and visual learner. I use an accessible laptop that magnifies and reads everything aloud to me, from books to the Internet. I recently graduated from UCLA School of Law and I was part of the steering committee that launched the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities; I served as the first president of the organization and now I'm working on starting a lawyers with disabilities organization. REBECCA WILLIFORD: My name is Rebecca Williford and I'm a third year at the University of North Carolina. I am also the current president of the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities, which we fondly call NALSWD for short. So from here on out we're going to be using that acronym. I have a chronic neurological and cardiovascular disorder called dysautonomia that started when I was fourteen. It was 104 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 hidden for four years and then I had to start using a wheelchair when I was eighteen. The process of becoming a person with a disability is an interesting one, but it's one that absolutely shook me to my core and set me on a path for a career as a disability rights lawyer that I would not be on otherwise. Before this, I was a competitive year-round swimmer, but I'm passionate about the path I'm on now and look forward to sharing more later. Thanks once again to Dean Jaffe for letting us be here today. Stephanie and I were actually both on the steering committee that started NALSWD and it started right here at the Washington College of Law when we had our first meeting. TREVOR FINNEMAN: Hello all. I hope you guys enjoyed lunch. That cake looked pretty good. I'm Trevor Finneman. I'm a second year at UCLA School of Law. I'm currently NALSWD Chair of the Advocacy Committee. I have a severe bilateral hearing loss that began at age three. STEPHANIE ENYART: So I know we mentioned that this is where NALSWD officially got its launch, but the American Bar Association Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities really was the reason why we even launched to begin with. They saw a need for students to be able to connect and have a student space similar to many of the other identity organizations for under-represented, or traditionally under- represented, communities within the legal profession. They raised money, they put together a conference to launch the organization, and they handed us the reins in moment one. I mean, literally, at the launch meeting, they got us together and said, "go forward, figure it out." So we had some seed money and we took it. We took the seed money to the initial meeting, which had about thirty students from across the country, to form a steering committee. This led to us planning and holding our first national conference in San Francisco in the fall of 2007. We adopted constitutional documents, a mission statement, and elected officers. We then launched several advocacy campaigns because we saw a need to have more students with disabilities get through the gates in terms of the LSAT since so many of us had faced similar barriers. Other advocacy projects grew out of the conversations we had about accommodations, how well some schools were doing in accommodating students with disabilities and that there seemed to be some big differences in what was happening across the board. One of the projects we've taken on is crafting a Best Practices for Accommodating Law Students with Disabilities guide. That's going to be available soon on our website. What this guide is hopefully going to do is show the high-water mark for schools to look to in creating systems that 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." work really well for students. Hopefully this will help schools that maybe haven't figured out how to strategically run certain programs - or if you're tired of trying to create the wheel - this can be a spot that people can turn to. It's a place where a dialogue between pre-law students, as they're just getting ready to start school, law students, and administrators can take place about different ways to accommodate and support students. So we will have much more information within our guide, but much of our comments today will kind of flow from the fact that we've been working on this guide. We also held a national conference in DC last August, our second one. At that conference, we partnered with the Impact Career Fair for Law Students and Lawyers with Disabilities, and we plan to do the same again this August. Where Impact is on Friday, our conference will be on Saturday and Sunday. We did that so students that wanted to take advantage of the interviews would be able to, and then they could work with us and come and connect with many of the mentors, speakers, and the community that we offer. So, in terms of NALSWD, we have many, many projects, many ideas, and we're always looking for new energy. This is why we're especially happy to be here today because oftentimes it can be an administrator that can say to a student, "hey, maybe this is the way you can make your law school experience a little bit more livable. Get connected with this organization." So that's a bit of a nutshell in terms of what our organization does and where it started. I also just wanted to mention that there is a link on your handout as well. Many of the students that are already law students and have disabilities had trouble with the LSAT. One of the things that we're trying to work on is to get more information out there for pre-law students to understand what accommodations are available and how they need to document their disabilities in order to get those accommodations. There is a survey online, which is where the link comes in handy, and we're looking for help from people that have already taken the test, either with all their accommodations or with some accommodations. Ultimately, this is a partnership through the Burton Blatt Institute, which is at Syracuse and also in DC. I think Eve Hill is somewhere here with Burton Blatt and the Association of Disability Rights Counsel ("ADRC"). Those two have partnered up with some of the student advocacy that NALSWD has pushed forward, and they're working toward making law school a bit more accessible for students that are applying with disabilities. So, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Rebecca. REBECCA WILLIFORD: We wanted to first lay a quick foundation about what it means to be a youngish person with a disability in the twenty- 106 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 first century, and in particular, a law student. From the morning and from lunch, we all know that in terms of disability, we are not in Kansas anymore. We are banking online. All kinds of opportunities for access are everywhere and so we're to claim disability as diversity. Hopefully that's a message that is out in the schools and, if it's not there, let's do a better job of getting it there, getting it to law firms, and just across the board. We're going to talk about this later, but first and foremost, disability is diversity. There are the absolutely wonderful, Yoshiko Dart and Justin Dart, and the whole self-empowerment movement. There is a beautiful movement of young people with disabilities. There is disability culture and there is disability pride. It's music and it's art. Every field you can imagine: crip culture, crip-hop music. It's everywhere and a lot of us are coming from this background. We are, I guess, the ADA generation in that we have gone through most of our schooling with the ADA in place, and even though the Act entitled us to accommodations and services in school, just having the ADA in place shifted the mindset of the country.
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