Judge David Tatel is an accomplished man.
He was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for nearly 28 years. He was also director of the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter administration, and he was the founding director of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Perhaps the most impressive part of his story is that he did all of this after becoming blind. Tatel lost his sight some time after graduating law school in the mid 1960s, after being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when he was just 15.
Now, the judge is coming to Baltimore to talk about the judiciary, his disability and his new book that tells his life story. Tatel’s appearance at The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore on Feb. 5 is part of a series focusing on Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion Month.
“I retired two years ago … I didn’t have any plans to write a memoir, but a lot of friends of mine who I care about thought that my story was worth telling — not just about dealing with blindness, but my views about the courts, so I decided to try it. I’ve never written a book before,” he said.
For Tatel, his story is about a lot more than just his lack of vision and how that impacted his career.
“There’s a story of the slow progress of losing one’s sight and my efforts to cover it up for years and not talk about it. It’s about a 60-year marriage with four kids and a lot of grandchildren. It’s about how critical technology has been to people with visual disabilities, and it’s about my views about the courts,” he said. “It’s about my life as a civil rights lawyer. It’s about the big environmental cases [I oversaw] and the future of democracy.
Then there’s an absolutely wonderful chapter at the end, called ‘The Dog that Changed My Life,’ which is about my guide dog, Vixen, who’s on the cover of the book.”
Jason Blavatt, chair of The Associated’s Caring and Community Relations Strategy Team, said that it’s an occasion worth highlighting.
“The Associated is committed to enhancing a culture of belonging that welcomes people with disabilities. The Associated partners with its network of agencies to offer a comprehensive range of disability and inclusion resources throughout the year,” he said.
Tatel said that it is apt that he is giving this talk in Baltimore, as it’s the place where the Foundation to Fight Blindness originated.
“It wasn’t curable [when I was diagnosed], but as you’ll see in the epilogue of the book, there are some very exciting scientific developments that can help people. It’s really quite amazing,” Tatel said.
Given his professional career, Tatel has thoughts on the current state of the federal courts. He plans to address that subject as well.
“My concern about the court is not so much about the results of its decisions, although I’m concerned about those, but the way in which it reaches them. It’s reaching them in non-judicial ways,” he said, mentioning the Supreme Court’s trend toward “shadow docket” decisions, or decisions without full debriefs, as an example.
When Tatel reflects on why he entered the legal world, he thinks about his lifelong goal to make society more equitable.
“My father was a scientist, and I went to the University of Michigan to become a scientist. But it was the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, and I was captured by what was going on in the south and by the brave lawyers and people and judges, and I decided I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer,” he said.
