Special Education Cause Lawyers

This Essay presents a study of leading U.S. lawyers who represent
families in disputes involving the special education of children with
disabilities. The research consists of structured interviews of selected
attorneys from around the country, and tests whether the conclusions
about disability cause lawyers drawn by Waterstone, Stein, and Wilkins
(in Disability Cause Lawyers, their pathbreaking study of thirteen
leading attorneys involved in disability rights work) hold true for
special education cause lawyers. Following the approach in Disability
Cause Lawyers, this study considers attorney backgrounds, practice
structure and financing, connections to social movement organizations,
and modes of advocacy. The study concludes that lawyers who engage
in the cause of educational rights of children with disabilities, like other
disability cause lawyers, face challenges of litigation financing, wary
courts, and a splintered social movement. Nonetheless, they manage to
avoid practices that some studies of cause lawyers have criticized: being
entranced with paper victories in court, and engaging too much with
legal elites and not enough with the social movement. In this way, they
also resemble the attorneys in the Disability Cause Lawyers study. The
scholarly debate on cause lawyering is extensive and contentious. This
Essay makes a unique contribution to that literature as the first study
of the work of lawyers who view educational rights for children with
disabilities as a social cause and who see themselves as contributing to
the movement for educational rights for individuals with disabilities