9. NEWS ARTICLE: Paul S. Miller, Advocate for Disables

23/10/2010 13:48

 

Paul S. Miller, Advocate for Disabled, Dies at 49

Published,October 20 2010 in The New York Times

My introduction about this News:  This a history of a men who was born whit dwarfisrm  ( small people ) and he want to be an important professional but  he only recive offers for work in a Cyrcus Show.    Finaly he studied in HARVARD the most famous University  and in his carrier he defends the disability people and figth to stop this kind of discrimination. This is a example of a PERSONAL SUPERATION of a disability person.   He was a very brilliant people and he was an IMPORTANT advisor of the president Barak Obama an the expresident Bill Clinton.    The last week octubre in 19 2010 he died because he has cancer.

 

Paul Miller, a lawyer who was born with achondroplasia — dwarfism — overcame discrimination because of his disability and became a leader in the disability rights movement, died Tuesday October 19 2010  at his home on Mercer Island, Wash. He was 49.   The cause was cancer, said his wife, Jennifer.

More than 40 times after graduating from Harvard Law School, Mr. Miller received rejection letters from law firms. One time, he said, he was told the firm feared that clients would see his hiring as a “circus freak show.”

But Mr. Miller went on to become an adviser to two presidents — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — a law professor and an expert on the intersection of disability law, employment discrimination and genetic science.

A professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Mr. Miller was director of the university’s disabilities studies program. For 10 years before joining the faculty in 2004, he was a commissioner of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. At the same time, he was the Clinton administration’s liaison to disability organizations, a role he reprised in the first nine months of the Obama presidency.

Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, said of Mr. Miller, “He was the person in the White House who recruited folks with disabilities to take positions all over those administrations — assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, commissioners.”

In recent years, Mr. Miller focused on tensions between disability rights and genetic science. In a paper titled “Avoiding Genetic Genocide,” Mr. Miller criticized scientists for what he saw as their eagerness to use genetics to produce “perfect” humans.

“Good health is not the absence of a disability,” he wrote. “Scientists caught up in the excitement of genetic discovery can forget that life with a disability can still be a rich and fulfilling life.”

Its purpose was “to bring attention to the risk of individuals losing their jobs if information about their future health risks were disclosed,” Dr. Collins said. “And the persistence paid off: after more than a decade of frustration, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was finally signed into law in 2008. Paul was one of its biggest heroes.”

Mr. Miller graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and received his law degree from Harvard three years later. He then began his difficult job search. He was eventually hired by a Los Angeles law firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. By 1990, he was director of litigation for the disability rights law center at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. That led to his position in the Clinton administration.

In 1997, he married Jennifer Coletti Mechem, who at the time was disability policy coordinator at the Department of Education; Ms. Mechem is hearing impaired.