The first of its kind in Canada, the program is a crash course in disability law
York’s Osgoode Hall Law School will launch a new program aimed at studying how the law affects those with disabilities.
The Disability Law Intensive Program, the first in Canada, will allow up to 12 Osgoode Juris Doctor students, in their second and third years of study, will focus on the legal challenges of disability.
The program, headed by Roxanne Mykitiuk, an Osgoode associate professor specializing in disability law and bioethics, and Marian MacGregor, director of Osgoode’s Community and Legal Aid Services Program is slated to start in September 2013.
“The goal is to introduce law students to clients with disabilities,” says Mykitiuk, adding that the program will give students the skills and perspective to work with them.
Students accepted to the program will work closely with ARCH Disability Law Centre, a Toronto legal aid clinic that specializes in high-level legal services for Ontarians with disabilities and disability advocacy organizations.
Six students will work directly with clients with disabilities on individual files, while the other six students will work on policy research. In January, these two groups will switch. Law students will see a case file from beginning to end.
Working with individuals and policies is equally important, MacGregor stresses.
“You can’t serve the needs of people with disabilities if you don’t actually serve people with disabilities,” she says.
By working on disability policy, students in this program will also see how decisions are made about people with disabilities in “murky administrative worlds,” MacGregor says.
The program will move away from charity or medical models of disability that view disability as a personal failing, and instead stress a model where disability is socially created, MacGregor says.
People can be impaired by their legs not working, MacGregor says, but they are disabled by staircase building designs.
“The [disability] law on the books often, not always, looks pretty good. It’s the law as it’s practiced and implemented that doesn’t work well,” says Mykitiuk.
Mykitiuk says, for example, there isn’t a well-enough funded legal aid system for people with disabilities to help them access their legal rights.
“It’s such a complicated network of legislation that regulates their lives,” she says.
Under the current curriculum, unless law students do a course on disability law, they do not get enough exposure to the subject, Mykitiuk says.
“And there very few of them in the course; there are very few of them that get any exposure to issues in disability and the law.”
By Ernest Reid, Executive Editor (Online)
