Matthew L. Timko (Northern Illinois), Applying Universal Design in the Legal Academy, 114 Law Libr. J. 343 (2022):

Too often barriers to access in the form of physical, technological, and cognitive environments play a large role in keeping many people out of law school. While federal and state laws address these barriers, universal design provides the clearest policy change for law schools to remedy these issues.

While UD removes physical, digital, and instructional barriers so that all indi viduals are allowed to participate in a law school education, it does even more. UD as a term connotes inclusivity and comradery as opposed to the “otherness” implied in the current terminology—terms such as “accessible,” “accommodating,” and “compliant.” Universal design offers the key to not only increased access to legal education and legal knowledge but also a more fundamental shift in the perceptions and thinking that have plagued disability laws and design habits over the last 30 years.

The types of UD features discussed throughout this article can be introduced into the law library gradually and in cost-effective ways. Such an approach allows more flexibility in implementing design features to see what works best for an institution’s library, which then can be applied to the institution itself. As this article demonstrates, there are tremendous legal, financial, and moral incentives to applying UD principles in the law school, and the law library provides the best venue for law schools to find what works best for the entire institution. It is vital that law schools and the larger legal community adopt UD to make the entire legal education process a model for the legal profession.