I think a lot of readers may be interested hearing about Harvard Law School's Project on Disability. A very nice story about the HPOD has just appreaed in the Harvard Law School Bulletin. Cribbing now a little from the article:
“We want to transform things entirely,” says [Michael Ashley] Stein, now the project’s executive director. ...
Collaborating with governments at the highest levels and working directly with people with disabilities, HPOD has made great progress in just a few years in promoting disability human rights worldwide. It has initiatives in China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, South Africa, Korea, Vietnam and other countries—all conducted on a pro bono basis. It has filed six amici briefs with the European Court of Human Rights—among them, one last year that helped overturn a law in Hungary that prevented people with disabilities from voting, in a case brought by Jan Fiala LL.M. ’10. (See sidebar.) HPOD has helped place HLS students in jobs at the U.S. Department of Justice’s division on Americans with disabilities and has hosted conferences, workshops and seminars at HLS. Last summer, in HPOD’s first internship program, five Harvard undergraduates traveled to Bangladesh to work on disability rights. They produced reports, including two on violence against women with disabilities, that were adopted by the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and by the U.N. special rapporteur on disability.
Perhaps most significantly, HPOD has played an important role in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006.
Especially in this era in which so much talk around law schools is about just the business of running the school, it's heartening to see stories about students and facutly who are getting down to what got us into this business in the first place -- working on law reform, helping clients, and teaching.
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