Adrián E. Alvarez

Adrian E. Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of Law and teaches Disability and the Law, Professional Responsibility, and Introduction to Law. His scholarship seeks to reimagine federal disability antidiscrimination law and policy and has appeared in the St. John’s Law Review and the online companion to the Arizona State Law Journal.

During the 2022-2023 school year, Professor Alvarez served as Special Counsel to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, where he advised the Department on its rulemaking to update regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a statute that prohibits disability discrimination in all public K-12 schools.

Prior to joining the St. John’s Law faculty, Professor Alvarez was a Practitioner-in-Residence with the Disability Rights Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, where he supervised student attorneys in special education cases and co-taught the clinic seminar. He has worked as an attorney for Children’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., representing parents in special education cases, and as a federal law clerk to the Honorable David Briones of the Western District of Texas (El Paso Division). 

Before he started his legal career, Professor Alvarez was a humanitarian aid worker in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, and a researcher for a Brazilian human rights organization based in Rio de Janeiro. He holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and a J.D. from American University Washington College of Law.