Carrie Griffin Basas
Assistant Professor of Law
Carrie Griffin Basas has joined The University of Tulsa as an assistant law professor in disability rights, constitutional law, and ethics. Before coming to Tulsa, she was a visiting assistant professor at Penn State- Dickinson School of Law and a visiting researcher at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include disability law, employment discrimination, the legal profession, food and animal law, and feminist legal theory. She has published in DISABILITY STUDIES QUARTERLY, THE REVIEW OF DISABILITY STUDIES, THE BERKELEY JOURNAL OF EMPLOYMENT AND LABOR LAW, AND THE FOOD AND DRUG LAW JOURNAL. She is one of the first women in the U.S. with a visible disability to hold a tenure-track position teaching law.
Before becoming a law professor, Ms. Basas was a disability rights advocate in nonprofit settings. She founded HireAbilities, a national organization dedicated to empowering emerging professionals with disabilities and educating employers about the Americans with Disabilities Act. She also worked as a consultant and speaker for disability rights organizations and government agencies. Today, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation and will become a Commissioner of the ABA's Commission on Physical and Mental Disability Law in August 2008.
Professor Basas is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School. In law school, she was active in Harvard Defenders, representing indigent clients. She also worked as a research assistant to several attorneys and professors arguing national and Supreme Court disability rights cases. After law school, she clerked for a judge on the D.C. Superior Court and briefly practiced environmental and civil rights law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Spiegel & McDiarmid.
In 2001, the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation recognized her for "changing the face of disability" and in 2002, the American Association of People with Disabilities named her as an emerging leader in disability rights. In 1998, she became a national Truman Scholar.
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website