On a summer morning in Robinson Courtroom nestled in LMU Loyola Law School’s Dordick Family Trial Advocacy Center, Ashley Longo LLS ’22, a prosecutor in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, shared her experiences with a group of students who can relate in a very personal way to her ambitions and the challenges she’s faced.
Longo, who was born paralyzed from the waist down, said she never thought of herself as someone with a disability. Loyola Law School (LLS) was her dream school, but coming from a small town where everyone knew her, she was nervous about being judged or perceived as different as a law student.
“I was so freaked out that I was going to be ‘that girl in the wheelchair,’” she said. “But everyone was so nice, and it was a level playing field.”
Longo’s talk was part of this year’s Coelho Law Fellowship. Since 2019, LMU’s Coelho Center for Disability Law, Policy, and Innovation has selected a cohort of Coelho Law Fellows each year to increase the pipeline of students with disabilities in law school. The fellowship is a key component of the multipronged mission of the multidisciplinary Coelho Center, which launched in 2018, that includes bolstering the number of elected officials and judges with disabilities, as well as fostering a dialogue on issues impacting those with disabilities.
Fellows – who are college students and recent graduates – meet virtually once a month throughout the year and annually in-person at the two-day conference. They also complete a summer intensive Disability Rights Law course. Each completes a disability rights project, such as writing a legal memo or organizing a panel discussion with experts. This year’s cohort of 58 fellows hail from all over the world, including South Africa, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Fellows attended classes on Loyola Law School’s downtown Los Angeles campus and LMU’s Westchester campus led by a range of nationally recognized experts that included LMU and LLS faculty, as well as other high-profile advocates. Sessions addressed such topics as Academic Ableism/Accommodations in Higher Ed, “Know-Your-Rights Workshop: Accommodations in Higher Ed,” and Title III of the ADA: The Internet as a Place of Public Accommodation,” which was led by Coelho Center Director Katherine Perez and Vivian Wong, interim director of the law school’s Youth Justice Education Clinic (YJEC). I. King Jordan, former president of Gallaudet University for the deaf and hard of hearing, delivered the lecture “Deaf, Diverse, and Distinct,” and Rebecca Cokley, disability rights officer from the Ford Foundation, participated in a Q&A.
In her talk, Longo shared that while she entered law school thinking of going into disability rights advocacy, participating in the Poehls/Hobbs District Attorney Practicum made her switch gears. “That’s when I discovered I loved being in court and wanted to do criminal law,” Longo said.
Her first job in the L.A. City Attorney’s office has been fast-paced, exciting, and demanding. After just three weeks on the job, Longo was assigned her first trial. But it hasn’t been without unique challenges: Longo said her first time in court, people assumed she was there to serve on a jury.
“People underestimated me, but you have to shove that aside and say, ‘I’ll prove you wrong,’” she said. “My disability doesn’t define me. I’m not afraid to speak up for myself.”
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Ashley Longo LLS ’22
Later in the afternoon, Associate Clinical Professor David King led a class on legal memo writing. As he went over the structure of CRAC (conclusion, rule, analysis, conclusion), a staple of law school instruction, students raised their hands to identify whether sentences of the legal memo in front of them were examples of “rule” or “analysis.”
One of the main draws of the fellowship for Emma Staples, who recently graduated from Whitman College in Washington, was the opportunity to meet and connect with other disabled students who share a similar goal of going to law school.
“In my college experience, I was not confident in myself that I would be able to continue in higher education. So it was really powerful to know that I did have this dream, and I did want to do this, and now there’s this space,” she said. “It felt like a lot of stars aligning for me.”
Fabiana Zorrilla, who is working on her doctorate in education at the University of Miami, said she’s deciding between pursuing a J.D. or a master’s in education policy. The fellowship courses on legal writing and other first-year law school topics have been especially helpful.
“I wanted to get a sense of what law school would be like,” she said. “Everybody is super friendly and approachable.”
Tony Coelho LMU ’64, Coelho Center founder and chief architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act during his time in Congress, joined some of the activities alongside the fellows. He said after his political and financial careers he wanted to give back and “try to make an impact.”
“I think it’s critical for those of us in the disability community to become positive about ourselves and feel that we can do anything that anybody else can do,” Coelho said.
He noted that more than 150 fellows have participated in the program, with alumni going on to careers in the White House, U.S. Senate, top law firms, local politics, and more.
“My philosophy for the disability community is: ‘give us the right to fail, then we have the opportunity to succeed,’” he said.
In her remarks, Fritz B. Burns Dean Brietta Clark echoed Coelho’s pride in the fellows’ ambition and capacity to have an impact. “You being here is you answering a call for leadership,” she said.
Learn more about the Coelho Fellowship via alumni testimonials.
