Visionary Voices
Interview with Judy Gran
February 17, 2012
Chapter One: Early Career
07:54:54:03 – 07:55:28:03
Lisa: Ok, we’ll begin our interview. My name is Lisa Sonneborn and I’m interviewing Judy Gran at Temple University on February 22, 2012. Also present is our videographer, Aggie Ibrahimi Bazaz and Judy do we have your permission to begin our interview?
Judy: Yes.
Lisa: Thank you. Welcome. Judy I wanted to ask you when and where you were born?
Judy: I was born in Roanoke, Virginia in, on May 19, 1943.
Lisa: Thank you. And what is your profession?
Judy: I’m a lawyer.
07:55:29:06 – 07:56:26:25
Lisa: Before you began working in your profession had you ever met a person with a disability?
Judy: I had met um actually quite a few people with disabilities in Egypt, where I lived for five years before I started law school and I actually visited several programs for people with disabilities while I lived there. I visited shelter workshops and residential arrangements and so forth and there were a lot people with disabilities just living with their families. And actually people with disabilities are somewhat more valued in societies like Egypt then they were at the time in Western industrial societies.
07:56:27:07 – 07:57:49:18
Lisa: And how was that evident Judy?
Judy: Well for example in the villages in the countryside when a person with very significant disabilities is born he’s often given the name Barack which means blessed, blessing and it is considered a blessing from God to have a child with significant disabilities. And more pragmatically, I guess, because a lot of people, there was a very high incidence of blindness in Egypt at the time because of a parasite that infects people in the water, when they work in the water and because people were spending a lot of time growing cotton, which required them to wade in the water, a lot of people developed blindness as result of this parasite and so many very eminent people who were leaders in the society were blind and that was really not in some ways considered a disability but just a condition.
07:57:50:27 – 07:54:15:06
Lisa: So, Judy, why did you choose a career in law?
Judy: Well the most immediate cause was that I was working on a Doctorate in Political Science and I did my research in Egypt under conditions that were very difficult because there was a war going on at the time and there were no diplomatic relations between Egypt and the United States and there was not technology available to copy documents, let alone computers to keep records on so it was very difficult and I had a lot of hand written notes and records that I’d collected and as we were coming home from Egypt we stopped in England and all of my notes were stolen so I had to make other plans. And I decided that this was a sign that I was meant to go to law school because that was something I had really wanted to do back when I decided to go to graduate school instead. So I did and it turned out to be a very good choice.
07:59:16:07 – 07:59:32:03
Lisa: What kind of law did you to practice when you made the decision to go to law school?
Judy: Civil rights in some form. I was pretty sure about that and those were the course I took in law school to the extent that I could.
07:59:34:02 – 08:00:11:07
Lisa: You spent, I believe, 25 years as a Staff Attorney for the Public Interest Law Center, well 25 years, your career at the Public Interest Law Center spanned 25 years some as a Staff Attorney, some as the Director for their Disabilities Project
Judy: Yes, 25 years as an attorney and I also spent a couple of years working there before I finished law school, before I was admitted to the Bar, including a year as an intern at the Temple Institute on Disabilities.
08:00:13:18 – 08:04:59:00
Lisa: And what was it about the Public Interest Law Center that attracted you?
Judy: Well another fortuitous circumstance, before we moved to Philadelphia I was planning to go to law school at Temple, my husband was coming here to take a teaching job at Temple and some people we knew in Austin, Texas, where we were living at the time, told me that I really must get in touch with Tom Gilhool who was a great Civil Rights lawyer, one of the leaders in the field and so as it turned out Tom gave some talks at the law school, which I attended and then I responded to a job announcement when I was at the end of my first year in law school and started working at the Law Center and I was completely blown away by the work that, that Tom and his colleague, Frank Laski, who was Director of the Disabilities Project at the time, Tom was chief council of the Law Center, but the work that they were doing on behalf of people with disabilities was just tremendously exciting and ground breaking and immensely substantive. I think what really distinguished their work from the work of many other public interest organizations at the time was that it really focused on getting real material changes in social structures, governmental structures, service delivery systems, things that really, really benefited people and responded to what people wanted, they weren’t just procedural changes as in so many of the cases that I had read in law school. And they were working on the, what was called the Part Two Implementation Case. This was a second phase of the original PARC versus Commonwealth, Right to Education Case and it was brought on behalf of children with the most significant disabilities in Philadelphia, in the School District of Philadelphia and it was brought as an implementation proceeding within the PARC Case. And it resulted in another agreement to create a different type of educational program for those students. They had been receiving very, very meaningless, age inappropriate instruction in very segregated classes and in many cases in Philadelphia, in separate schools for kids with profound disabilities so this, that proceeding really brought about a major change in the way services were provided to those students. It was incredibly exciting and I attended the trial, which lasted about a week, after which the case settled and the leading experts in the field all testified and Judge Becker presided over the case, Judge Edward Becker whom I’m sure you’ve heard about and his role in many of the cases on behalf of people with disabilities and Judge Becker knew more than most special education teachers about special education and he was very engaged. It was a very exciting trial and had a great result. And at the same time Tom and Frank were working on the Pennhurst litigation, which the orders had come down, as you know, in 1977 and ’78 and then there was a proceeding in the court of appeals and by the time I joined the Law Center it was in the Supreme Court for the first time. The Supreme Court had granted cert and Tom and Frank were working on the brief in the Supreme Court after which it was argued. So it was just a tremendously exciting time and I was completely hooked on this work.
08:04:59:24 – 08:05:35:29
Lisa: I’m sure you were. It seems almost a revolutionary time in many ways. Very exciting.
Judy: It was. It was. I can’t exaggerate how revolutionary it was. I mean remember that Pennsylvania really had no community service system at all for people with disabilities until the early ‘70s and it was only gradually developing throughout the ‘70s and it really serve people with the most significant disabilities until the implementation phase of Pennhurst.
Chapter Two: Pennhurst Litigation
08:05:36:10 – 08:07:43:11
Lisa: I want to ask you about that because I know the Pennhurst Case was very long, was very lengthy and very complicated and I think it would certainly help folks listening to our conversation to have a little bit of background about that. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is that even before the Pennhurst litigation something around $20 million had been appropriated by the Senate to start moving people from Pennhurst into the community but that never really happened, it never really took hold. Do you have any idea as to why that might have been?
Judy: No I really don’t. That was before my time, actually, but it, a lot of the people who were moved from Pennhurst in the early days were moved to other institutions and that’s another part of the implementation story but they were moved to Embreeville, a lot of people where moved to Embreeville, many people were moved to Pine Hill which was essentially a nursing facility for people with complex medical needs and so forth, a lot of people were moved to Elwyn and the service system had not developed to the point where it could support people with more complex needs so people with mild disabilities could go to the community, people with more complex needs had to go to other institutions. Actually the first community living arrangement in Philadelphia for a person with significant disabilities was created for Walter Fialkowski the son of Leona Fialkowski, one of the petitioners in the Part Two enforcement proceeding and that wasn’t until the late ‘70s.
08:07:48:09 – 08:08:33:08
Lisa: Thank you. So when you joined PILCOP as a Staff Attorney, as you had said PILCOP had been representing the, some of the plaintiffs of the Pennsylvania Arc and the Pennhurst.
Judy: Yes.
Lisa: Litigation for maybe 10 year, nearly 10 years or so.
Judy: Right. Right. Yes, the Arc and a number of individuals intervened in the case in 1975 and converted it from a fix up case into a case about community placement and it was very significant because it was the first case of its kind that was really brought to, to bring people into the community as opposed to improving conditions at the institution.
08:08:33:16 – 08:16:44:24
Lisa: I wonder, also, Judy if you could give us maybe a very brief overview of the case
Judy: Yes, well yes. It was an unusually complex case procedurally as well as substantively but it was filed by the original plaintiffs, Terri Lee Halderman et al. in 1974 and they sought damages and improvement in conditions in the institution. The Arc of Pennsylvania intervened in 1975 with its own complaint which called for placement in the community and the development of community services. The United States also intervened in the case about the same time seeking to enforce Federal Law, specifically Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act which had just recently been enacted. And it went to trial in 1977, was at trial for about six weeks, I think, and the Judge issued his decision the day before Christmas Eve in 1977 finding liability under, on many different grounds. First of all the Constitution, the Due Process clause and the Equal Protection clause, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which called, required services in the most integrated setting and State Law, the Pennsylvania Mental Health and Mental Retardation Act of 1966, which also had a community inclusion provision. So the Commonwealth and the Counties appealed and the Court of Appeals decided to uphold the original orders but on a different ground. Sometime in the process of the litigation the case is going to trial and going up on appeal Congress had passed the Developmental Disabilities Bill of Rights and Assistance Act which of course supports the Institute on Disabilities, the protection and advocacy systems and so forth and it contained a least restricted environment provision. So the Court of Appeals decided that by accepting Federal Funds under this statute the Commonwealth had agreed to support people in the most integrated setting so they upheld the original orders under that statute. That was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Commonwealth petitioned for certiorari on the ground that there was no right of action, a person with disabilities could not bring an action under this statute for violation of its provisions and that was a very important issue in the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and held that there was no right to bring an action under the DD Act, that only, only the administration could enforce it by withholding funds presumably and that holding actually had implications for a whole lot of different Federal statues and the ripple effect is still going on today with decisions, refinements of that standard coming down from the Supreme Court on a fairly regular basis. So it went back to the Court of Appeals and the Court of Appeals had all these other grounds that the Supreme, that the Distract Court had ruled on and they decided to uphold the original orders under State Law, the MH/MR Act, and the Commonwealth appealed again and I was working as an intern at that time, at the Law Center with Tom, and I remembered how stunned he was when the Supreme Court granted certiorari for the second time because we completely expected the original orders to be upheld, everyone did and Tom actually had written a press release and he had arranged to hold a press conference in Washington on a Monday morning when the Supreme Court was expected to announce the cases in which it had granted or denied certiorari and we, Tom had written a 20 page press release and kept working on it and kept working on it and as he was still working on it the news came down that the court had decided to hear the case again which was very, very amazing. So it was briefed and argued and then the Court decided to hear reargument. Apparently, I gather that the Court must’ve not been able to decide the case the first time around and the issue there was whether a Federal Court has the authority under the 11th Amendment, very arcane piece constitutional jurisprudence, to order State officials to comply with State law. And eventually after the case was reargued the Court reversed again and decided that a Federal Court does not have that authority, it can only order State officials to comply with Federal Law. And that holding too has had many implications for Federal jurisprudence in a lot of other areas. So the case went back to the Court of Appeals again and this was in, the Supreme Court ruled for the second time in February 1984 and it went back and the Court, the Court of Appeals by now had to decide the Constitutional issues and in the meantime a case called Youngberg versus Romeo involving an individual Pennhurst resident had been decided so that there was some good case law on the Constitutional standard under the due process clause. So I think everyone on the plaintiff’s side was pretty hopeful that the court would rule in our favor on the Constitutional questions and in the meantime the parties finally decided to settle the case in a lengthy mediation before Court of Appeals, a Court of Appeals judge, Max Rosin and that was successful and the result was the final settlement agreement which was approved by the court on April 5, 1985.