Christopher Czerwonka, the Legal Director of the Strong Children Wellness Medical Legal Partnership, is a New York licensed attorney and Special Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, where he presently teaches Bioethics and the Law, Public Health Law, Policy and Ethics, and The ADA: Statutory Interpretation (a course he developed for the law school) in the online LLM/MA program. He also lectures worldwide on disability law and anti-discrimination advocacy, and practices in these areas, immigration law, public benefits, and general and special education law. He is an appointed member of the Adult Ethics Committee in the Division of Medical Ethics at Northwell Health, one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems. He also holds an appointment as a Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Research at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, SUNY Albany, where he researches and lectures on general public consciousness of Constitutional rights, and on issues of subordinated identity and the law. In 2014, the President of the New York State Bar Association appointed him to serve on the State Bar Committee on Disability Rights. In that capacity, he is one of the chief advisers to the Bar on such matters. He has also worked with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund in New York, working on legal name-change cases and on anti-discrimination litigation, mostly involving health insurance refusals to cover gender confirmation surgery for transgender clients. A nationally recognized authority on intersections between disability and LGBT law, he has consulted pro bono for the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, advising on test case litigation and leading a strategy seminar on this topic for all of Lambda’s offices. Prof. Czerwonka is committed to civic education for all young people. In that spirit, he was appointed in 2016 to the New York State Bar Committee on Law, Youth and Citizenship and its Mock Trial Committee, where he co-wrote that year’s high school mock trial tournament problem, Robin Berkman v. County of Dover. Additionally, he lectures on the Constitution and other civic and historical topics to elementary school-aged students.
Christopher Czerwonka
Intersectional Education: LGBTQ+, Racial, and Disability Diversity in Law Schools