Wettach receives Lifetime Champion of Justice award for work as an education advocate
William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law Jane Wettach founded the Children’s Law Clinic and is one of the state’s foremost experts in special education law.
William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law Jane Wettach
The North Carolina Justice Center presented its Lifetime Champion of Justice award to Jane Wettach, the William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law, for her work as an education advocate.
Wettach was honored at an April 13 luncheon at which she also was presented with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine award, the governor's highest honor, given for exemplary service to the state of North Carolina. A slideshow video of the celebration can be viewed here.
"I can’t think of a recognition I’d rather have than to be considered a champion of justice," Wettach said in her remarks.
"The longer I spent representing individual clients, the more I came to see that they were the individual manifestations of our state’s perpetual failure to prioritize the needs of its children. ... I look forward to the day when another education advocate receives a recognition like the one I received today, and can report that North Carolina has become a model for other states and is a leader in its commitment to its children."
Prior to her retirement in June 2020, Wettach was the longtime director of the Children’s Law Clinic, a student-staffed community law office that provides free legal advice, advocacy, and representation to low-income families in cases involving special education, school discipline, and children’s disability benefits. In addition to founding the clinic, Duke Law’s second, in 2002, Wettach was supervising attorney for Duke Law’s AIDS Legal Assistance Project, now the Health Justice Clinic, and taught education law and legal writing and analysis. Prior to joining Duke Law she had a 14 year career at Legal Aid of North Carolina.
Wettach is one of the state’s foremost experts in special education law. During her career she led the revision of school discipline statutes to protect the due process rights of suspended students and outlaw the “zero tolerance” approach to school discipline. She also developed the state’s special education bar by organizing an annual roundtable held at Duke Law and won a case before the North Carolina Supreme Court, King v. Beaufort County Board of Education, which established the right of students to attend alternative school during a suspension in most cases. Her work on that case earned her the NC Justice Center’s Defender of Justice Award for litigation in 2010. She continues to serve as a resource to media and policymakers on the state’s private school voucher system and other issues related to education.
“Jane’s remarkable work improved the quality of education for tens of thousands of families across the state,” said Matt Ellinwood, director of the Education & Law Project at the NC Justice Center. “She represented students with disabilities and advocated on behalf of communities dealing with disparities in the use of exclusionary school discipline policies, and served as a mentor to the next generation of attorneys working on behalf of North Carolina’s children.”
Wettach told Duke Law Magazine in 2020 that her advocacy outside of the clinic evolved naturally. “As I gained more knowledge and expertise, I saw things that I thought needed to be done and I did them,” she said.