Joint degree in law, disability offered

By: Daniel Rivero

Posted: 2/14/03

Since she was 12 years old, Cindy Smith knew that her goal in life was to help the legally handicapped. Growing up with a stepsister who has a physical disability and a mother who teaches special education only inspired her to seek the delivery vessel for that destination.

In college she explored the options. Her first instinct was to be a teacher, so she studied speech communication — that didn’t work. After her first year, she realized her interests didn’t lie in being a clinician, so she switched to psychology.

A year-and-a-half ago she began looking at law schools, but the majority didn’t have the coursework that interested her.

It wasn’t until she spoke with Syracuse University professors last April about their future plans that she heard about a dual degree program in law and disability studies.

Smith hadn’t heard about such program because no program ever existed before.

That is until now. Next fall, SU’s College of Law and School of Education will launch the country’s first ever dual degree program, where students will earn both a J.D. and a master's degree in education specializing in disability studies in three years.

“Many of the other law schools had only one course in disability,” said Smith, a first-year student in the College of Law. “I was always going to get a degree in law and if I had to go to another school and get a separate degree in disability studies, I would do that too.”

Next year Smith will enroll in SU’s program.

“The idea for this program goes back three or four years when we first started having discussions,” said Steven Taylor, professor and coordinator of disability studies at the School of Education. ”I talked about collaboration with Professor Arlene Kanter from the law school, who had a background in disability law a number of years before coming to SU. She also directs a public interest law clinic and has represented people with disability in court cases.”

First-year law student Julie Morse will join Smith in the program because she too is attracted to the interdisciplinary benefits.

“After I took an intro to disability studies class my senior year in college, I decided I wanted to combine working with people with disabilities and law,” Morse said. “I worked as a case manager with children and I looked for programs in the U.S. that would allow me to do both a masters in disability and a degree in law.”

The program’s launch, Taylor believes, is a recognition of the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in educating about contemporary problems. The two schools began noticing that students from their own programs were taking elective courses in the other’s.

“My work happens to be in sociology not law, so I’m concerned about how to change public attitudes,” Taylor said. “Take racial integration, for example. Even though we passed laws to end segregation in 1955, we’re still not an integrated society and the same goes for people with disability.”

Only recently did people with disabilities gain rights but the societal change is very slow, Taylor added.

“We need initiatives from legal rights and we need efforts to change from the way society and community see people with disabilities. This program is to prepare the student to confront the various barriers.”

Taylor believes that such dual programs enhance the scholarship of a university.

“It’s personally the natural tendency for faculty to work within their own school. Generally, what SU is trying to do and encourage is interdisciplinary cooperation.”

SU also began the first graduate disability studies program in the country in 1995.