Disability, Antidiscrimination Expert To Join Faculty

Alice Abrokwa, a U.S. Education Department lawyer with expertise in disability law, health law and antidiscrimination law, will join the University of Virginia School of Law faculty this summer.

Abrokwa, who will teach Civil Procedure and Pain and the Law in the coming school year, brings a wealth of experience as a public interest lawyer to the Law School. Currently senior counsel at the Education Department, a presidentially appointed position, she works on matters under the jurisdiction of the Office for Civil Rights. Abrokwa has been a senior attorney for the National Center for Youth Law, a trial attorney with the Disability Rights Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and a Skadden Fellow with the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.

“I am so excited to welcome Alice to the Law School,” Dean Risa Goluboff said. “She has such deep and varied experience across so many related fields — education, disability, and health and mental health law. Her unique set of skills and expertise makes her both an innovative scholar and a wonderful and important resource for our students.”

Abrokwa, a Harvard Law School graduate, is currently an annual fellow for Harvard’s Project on Disability. In addition to her J.D., she holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. in public and international affairs from Princeton University.

After graduating from Harvard, she clerked for Judge James R. Spencer in the Eastern District of Virginia and for Judge Roger L. Gregory of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Growing up in Auburn, Alabama, Abrokwa said, she was “quite focused on fairness for children and youth,” and began law school expecting to work in the juvenile delinquency system as a lawyer representing children and young adults. An internship with a nonprofit now called the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights changed her trajectory.

“I had an experience my second summer of law school where I worked at a juvenile public defender’s office that had a holistic approach to defense,” she said, “And that got me really thinking about mental health as an important intervention point in the lives of the same population of vulnerable and marginalized children and youth.”

Abrokwa’s everyday experiences working on behalf of clients inform her scholarship and an academic approach that bridges the practical and theoretical.

At the Bazelon Center, Abrokwa worked on behalf of a young student who repeatedly faced suspensions from school because of behaviors related to the student’s disabilities. She connected the staff with a behavioral expert to train teachers on how to meet the student’s needs proactively. The school continued to use the expert again and again.

“No one was starting off with bad intentions,” she recalled. Abrokwa said there was a lack of resources, expertise and knowledge needed to support the student. But once school staff committed to learning how specific behaviors signal a need for certain supports, “that ended up having benefits not just for that one student, but for other students as well.”

She added, “I was really encouraged by the school’s willingness to partner and to invest in [their staff’s] skillset.”

Abrokwa has also worked on impact litigation to help students receive mental health services outside school, in home- and community-based settings.

“I litigated a class action that was about improving the children’s mental-health system more broadly for Medicaid-eligible children and making sure that [these children] weren’t cycling in and out of institutions [and] were getting what [they] needed — at home, in school and in [the] community — more comprehensively.”

Abrokwa said turning to academia will allow her to dive more deeply into questions that came up in her work as a lawyer.

“In a particular case, you have to focus on what your client needs and what the facts of the case are, so one thing I am really looking forward to in academia is the ability to take a step back and think through theoretical questions that may not arise commonly in litigation,” she said. “Testing the bounds of the law, thinking through theoretical questions is another way of shaping legal outcomes broadly and at a high level of impact, regardless of whether you’re able to do that in an individual litigation.”

One of Abrokwa’s articles, “Too Stubborn to Care for: The Impacts of Discrimination on Patient Noncompliance,” published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, explores what happens at the intersection of many issues she worked on. In the article, Abrokwa focused on the health care context and the consequences that result when a doctor labels a patient as “noncompliant” with doctor’s orders.

“Not everyone gets afforded the same grace when they’re considered to be noncompliant,” she said, noting that the issue stretches from schools to police interactions to the health care system. “Sometimes there’s an additional kind of scrutiny one might face that intersects with race, disability and sex.”

In the health care setting, Abrokwa explained that “[t]he ability of medical providers to label a patient ‘noncompliant’ on their medical record has this extra power that the legal system gives it, which I was taken aback by and I wanted to really explore in the piece.”

A patient who is considered noncompliant by their doctor might not be able to fully recover damages in a medical malpractice case, for example.

Additionally, if a patient is labeled in this way, “it can mean that they are unable to access disability benefits and it can be used as character evidence.”

As a disability rights lawyer, Abrokwa’s work has touched on everything from employment law to education to policing and, central throughout, “a set of civil rights” for people with disabilities across systems and contexts.

Abrokwa said she was looking forward to joining colleagues and students at UVA.

“I’m excited to help students in particular who are interested in public interest figure out what that path might look like for them, including government lawyering or clerking,” she said.

Abrokwa said she has long been interested in serving the greater good.

“One of the highest and greatest uses of something as powerful as a legal education is to use it to serve the public,” she said. “I’ve been really honored to be able to do that through litigation and through policy work. It’s really fulfilling for me.”

Professor Joy Milligan, who served on the faculty appointments committee this year, said Abrokwa “is someone who I think students are going to gravitate toward. She’s got an amazing manner, and I think she’s going to be a star in the classroom as well as in scholarship.”

“She has a deep practice background, she’s a really smart and talented lawyer, but she’s also theoretically ambitious and reads broadly and draws on research across multiple disciplines, including public health, medicine, other social sciences, social theory and law. So I’m really thrilled that she’s coming.”