Michael Schwartz
Associate Professor of Law and Director, Disability Rights Clinic, Syracuse University College of Law
Michael Schwartz, a deaf lawyer, is an associate professor of law and has been the director of the Disability Rights Clinic in the Office of Clinical Legal Education at the Syracuse University College of Law since August 2004. Schwartz received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brandeis University and a Master of Arts degree in Theater Arts from Northwestern University. He then joined the National Theater of the Deaf and toured the United States as D’Artagnan in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. When his tour ended, Schwartz enrolled in New York University School of Law where he obtained his JD degree and joined the New York State Bar. His first legal position was a judicial clerkship in the chambers of Federal District Judge Vincent L. Broderick of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. After his clerkship, Schwartz joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as an Assistant District Attorney in the Office’s Appeals Bureau and served seven and one-half years. He then became a Trial Attorney in the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter he got married and relocated to New York City to practice law on his own for three years. During this time he was admitted to the Bars of the States of New Jersey and Connecticut. Schwartz then joined the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Department of Law as an Assistant Attorney General and successfully litigated the Office’s first Americans with Disabilities Act case, which established the right of a State Attorney General to bring an action under the ADA on behalf of the state’s residents with disabilities. Schwartz then left the Department of Law, obtained his LL.M degree from Columbia University School of Law, and joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York for the next four years. Schwartz then joined the law faculty at Syracuse University in 2004 and received his Ph.D. degree in Education with a concentration in Disability Studies from Syracuse University in May 2006.
