Good morning, Professor Abrokwa. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today! We’re excited to have you join the UVA Law faculty, and I’m very much enjoying your class thus far. Maybe we can start with a little bit about where you’re from and how you are liking Charlottesville so far.
Yeah, so I’ve been living in DC for the past ten years. I went there because I knew it would be a good place to practice public interest work, so I spent the time at various nonprofits and at the federal government. I’ve worked at the Department of Justice in the past, and most recently I was coming from the Department of Education, all doing civil rights work. Before that, I lived in Richmond, and people told me to expect Charlottesville to be a little like Richmond which has been the case so far. I grew up in a pretty small college town too, so there’s a lot that’s familiar to me here from my life growing up.
I saw that you were previously a fellow with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and a senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education. Can you tell us a little more about those past work experiences?
The fellowship was really my own research and engagement with other scholars around disability civil rights issues. My work at the Department of Education was on education civil rights, but most of that looked like disability civil rights too. My first job after clerking was focused on children with mental health disabilities, making sure they had the support they needed to do well in school and that they had home and community-based mental health care. So, most of my expertise has been focused on children with disabilities. I did that work at the Department of Education most recently working on drafting regulations. The Department’s regulations that protect students from disability discrimination haven’t been updated in a generation, so I spent a long time working on those regs and then separately my own scholarship through the program with Harvard.
What inspired you to transition from practicing to teaching?
I knew I liked the kind of writing you get to do as a scholar. When you write as a lawyer for a client or even a government agency, it’s not your voice, it’s not your perspective, but when you engage in legal scholarship you get to articulate your own views. They don’t have to be tied to particular facts, they don’t have to be within the limits of what makes sense for your case or the jurisdiction of the office that you work in. I found it really liberating to think through legal questions and problems that maybe don’t often arise in practice but are still interesting to me. I’ve also lectured over the years at various law schools in the D.C. area and had a lot of fun meeting with students in that capacity. Lastly, I’ve done all public interest since I graduated law school and there’s a strong pay-it-forward mentality. I benefited a lot from people who were willing to give me career advice, and I spent a lot of my time out of law school giving advice to law students or recent grads. So, I just had the realization at some point that being a law professor combines everything that I already know I like: the scholarship piece, mentoring and advising students, and the actual teaching part has been really fun.
Speaking of advising, do you have any advice for students who are interested in a career in public service?
I think the number one concern I’ve heard from people is that it’s hard to get a job in public interest and also manage your loans. That’s a real consideration for a lot of people. I participated in public service loan forgiveness programs, both at my law school and the federal program. I wouldn’t have been able to do public interest if it hadn’t been for those programs. I was able to do fellowships at non-profits that wouldn’t have had the money on their own to pay my salary. So that’s a realistic option, and I hope that people consider it. The other thing that I will say is you can still do work that serves the public from a firm. There are lots of smaller law firms in the DC area that have civil rights practices and they’re really robust. A lot of them are staffed by people who were former government attorneys, civil rights attorneys, defenders, and prosecutors, so if you want to do that kind of work you can do that at a firm too. The last option I’d say is government lawyering positions. They can be a bit more stable, they pay a little bit better than some nonprofits, and a lot of states have honors attorneys programs. So, don’t be discouraged if you are worried about paying for your loans or finances in pursuing public interest. There are ways to make it happen!
You mentioned that you are teaching a course called Pain and the Law in the spring. Can you give a sneak peek at some of the topics that will be discussed in the course?
The idea behind the Pain and the Law class is to think about different contexts where the law regulates the experience of pain. There are some contexts where the law authorizes the infliction of pain on someone else. Coming from the school and health perspective that I do, you could think about restraint or seclusion of the student or corporal punishment as an infliction of pain, but there are also plenty of examples in the criminal legal context too. So, the law allows the infliction of pain in one context, but also creates a remedy for the experience of pain, like pain and suffering damages or reparations. The idea behind the class is to tease out what the law does with pain when it forces someone to endure it and authorizes that infliction, and when it creates a remedy for it.
---
Interviewed by Alicia Kaufmann '27