All About Change - Justice is Blind: Richard Bernstein, Michigan Supreme Court Justice

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Richard Bernstein is the first blind Supreme Court Justice in Michigan. In his conversation with Jay, Richard talks about his pro-bono legal work towards improving the lives of people with disabilities, the 24 marathons he ran - and the surprising and destructive effect the COVID pandemic had on his life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I am willing to bet you that if I had gone in front of a committee, a merit selection committee, they would have said, oh, my goodness, that is so inspirational that, you know, this person is blind and they want to be a Supreme Court justice. And I'm so inspired. But as soon as you leave the room and the door is closed, I am willing to bet that the conversation would take a totally different tone. I am willing to bet that the conversation would take a totally different tone and it would be that of it's just not going to work. It's just going to make it too challenging and too difficult for the court to have to sustain that. All Inclusive, a podcast on inclusion, innovation and social justice with Jay Ruderman. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and this is All Inclusive, a podcast focused on inclusion, innovation, and social justice. Tireless, committed, dedicated.

These are just some of the adjectives used by journalists and biographers to describe this episode's guests' long-time fight for the rights of people with disabilities. Richard Bernstein is a justice at the Michigan Supreme Court. As a lawyer, he has fought for and won many cases against various organizations and service providers on behalf of citizens with disabilities, many of them pro bono. But he is also a triathlete and an 18 times marathon runner. Oh, and he's also legally blind since birth.

Justice Bernstein, welcome to my podcast, All Inclusive. Before we dive into your legal work, please describe to our audience your career path thus far and how you came to be a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Well, first off, Jay, I love your podcast and I love your foundation and I love what you do. You have enhanced so many people's lives and had such a profound impact that I'm delighted to be a part of this. Your question is, you know, how did you get to become a Supreme Court justice for the state of Michigan? And it's a really interesting question because in Michigan, we elect our justices. We're not appointed. And the reason I say quickly about the distinction between being elected versus being appointed is that if it was an appointment

process, I am willing to venture that if I had gone in front of a committee, a merit selection committee, they would have said, oh my goodness, that is so inspirational that, you know, this person is blind and they want to be a Supreme Court justice. And I'm so inspired. But as soon as you leave the room and the door is closed, I am willing to bet that the conversation would take a totally different tone. And it would be that of, wow, as incredibly exciting as this is, and as inspired as this is, it's just not going to work. We don't want to go with someone who has a disability because it's just going to make it too challenging and too difficult for the

court to have to sustain that. And I think, Jay, when you ask about the career path, the reason that I love my state is because when you take the message to the people and you allow for the 11 million people who live in the great state of Michigan to decide who is going to represent them on the state's highest court, they saw blindness as an advantage because they came to realize as voters that you understood struggle, that you understood hardship, that you understood difficulty. And as a result of that understanding, you were able to empathize and understand and relate to the challenges and to the hardships and to the difficulties that real people have to face and have to contend with each and every day.

I insisted that my campaign slogan be blind justice. That was my slogan. It's hokey. It's silly. But that was the whole idea. The fact that I was putting it out there and emphasizing blindness and doing it in a fun way, I made it the kind of thing where you felt comfortable asking the questions that I needed people to ask.

I needed labor and farmers and truck drivers and all different people across the state to ask the questions they needed to ask, which is, you know, how can you be a judge? How can you keep up with the materials? How can you understand a crime scene? How can you see people's facial expressions? I mean, people are going to have genuine interest in how you can perform your duties as a Supreme Court justice. But I think, Jay, the key to it is, as long as you do it in a fun way, as long as you make people feel comfortable and can just have a conversation with you and ask you the questions that they need to have asked, then what usually happens is the people that are doubters, because they assume that this is something that you're not going to be able to do, do, once you assuage all of their concerns, will become your most ferocious supporters,

because they felt that it applied to them. And they felt that having someone who's blind in this position, who can understand and identify hardship and struggle, would mean that you could appreciate their issues and their concerns, and represent what they feel is important. You were involved in many notable legal cases as an attorney before you became a Supreme Court justice in Michigan. So let's go all the way back to 2004 and a federal lawsuit that you were involved in against the Detroit Department of Transportation for failure to serve people with disabilities. Can you talk a little bit about this case and specifically why proper transportation

is so vital for people with disabilities? Well, I'm so glad you asked that, Jay, because this was my first big case. But it was, without a doubt, unbelievably difficult. What was happening in Detroit was the buses were operating without workable wheelchair lifts. And the estimate was that about 60%, think about that, Jay, 60% of the fleet didn't have workable lifts. And the reason I took on this case, I just remember kind of how this all happened. I had a meeting once. It was a meeting of people with disabilities, and I couldn't understand why nobody was there. Like, I showed up at this meeting, and I don't know, maybe two other people were there, but it was supposed to be a large meeting.

And I asked the organizer, I said, well, where is everybody? Like, why isn't anybody at this meeting? Like, why aren't people here? And they said, oh, well, because the buses don't have workable wheelchair lifts. So I'm sure they're trying to get here, but they can't. And then I, you know, started to realize that, oh my God, you know, you had veterans that basically were in many situations not leaving their homes during the winter in Detroit because they were too worried that if they started a journey and, you know, got stuck in a transfer that they, that a bus would come along that wouldn't have a wheelchair left. They would wind up spending entire evenings in bus shelters. You know, at that time, there was a mayor,

and it was Kwame Kilpatrick. I remember going and talking, you know, to his people and just saying, look, you know, we've got to do something, you know, to help folks with disabilities with special needs. I mean, you can't leave them stranded on the streets. I mean, this is crazy. And their response, which was a typical response was, and I'm just going to be candid,

their response was they didn't care. And the reason they didn't care is why does government care? Why do people act? It's because either A, politics or money, right? It's going to be one of those two. And if you have people that are disenfranchised, who aren't really part of the political process, they're not going to move huge numbers of voters, and then they don't have any money. Why would you listen to them? You know, and that was what the mayor's position was. These

people aren't going to be able to do anything to me. They're not really relevant, and they're not going to be very impactful in terms of his administration. So he didn't care. He literally didn't care. So I sued him, and I put it in the federal court. And what made it so hard was it got so personal between me and the mayor, which was so unnecessary. He would come and have press conferences conferences and he would say to people in Detroit, you know, we here in Detroit, we are not going to allow Richard Bernstein from the town of Birmingham to come into our city and to come into Detroit, Michigan and tell us how to run our city. And he would say, you know, we got to rise up against people like Mr. Bernstein. He'd say, I'm sorry that many of you are going to lose your jobs.

But you know what? If you're angry, you need to go and take it out on Mr. Bernstein out in Birmingham, Michigan. You know what? You know what ultimately happened? Nobody in Detroit bought it. Nobody signed on to his rhetoric. No one bought it. Nobody signed on to his rhetoric. No one liked it. In fact, the NAACP and all the major ministers and community leaders were infuriated by his conduct

and basically came out against the mayor and said, not only what he was doing was inappropriate, but they fully support what I was doing because I was trying to make things better for the residents and the community members of Detroit. And it went on for a while, but ultimately what happened was that in the end, the Department of Justice intervened and bred in federal oversight. And now what's great about the city of Detroit is the buses work beautifully. I can't say they're perfect because nothing is going to be perfect, but you don't have these issues. They bought all new buses. They retrained the drivers.

Ridership, according to Detroit Free Press, went up by 20% because once they made it accessible that everyone could use it, basically the ridership increased dramatically to the point where the ridership ultimately allowed for them to cover any of the

related expenses that came with the new equipment and the new training. But now people don't stay in their houses. They go out, they're out and about, they're doing things, you know, they're going to work. It's not just going to the doctor. Life is more about not just that. I mean, they have work, social engagement, seeing friends, doing things. They're using public transportation. So lawyers, you know, if you really care about civil rights and you really want to make a difference, you can do this in a proper way. Right.

Let me bring you on to 2008 in a lawsuit that you were involved with on behalf of Michigan Paralyzed Veterans of America against the University of Michigan to make its stadium accessible for people in wheelchairs. And this came about after a $226 million renovation for the university that failed to have enough seats for people with disabilities.

So, Jay, the thing that arises out of that that I think is significant is the question and the discussion about diversity. And what I found at the University of Michigan with that case was that when they discussed the concept of diversity, they did not deliberately include people with disabilities in that discussion. And I think, Jay, what happened in that case was a blatant example of it, right? The University of Michigan had spent, I mean, well over $200 million to renovate the stadium. And this wasn't an accident. They deliberately weren't going to make the stadium accessible. And in fact, the university was going so far as to, I would say, do it in a very callous manner, they knew that under the ADA, there was a question about what constitutes a repair versus what constitutes an alteration. If you take an existing structure and you repair it, you don't have to bring it into compliance. If you alter it, you do. And the university deliberately did this. The university would deliberately basically, you know, do separate little mini projects.

They would say, okay, well, we're fixing the bleachers. We're putting in new cement. We're putting in new bathrooms. We're putting in new concessions. But they would have the regents vote on it separately so that they could deliberately state that these were separate repairs, right? That they were just basically a conglomeration of repairs. And ultimately, what they were doing, think about this, the University of Michigan, this bastion of progressive ideology is basically, literally putting the entire ADA at risk. And the reason, Jay, that that was the case was because if the

university had been successful in what it was trying to do, what would have happened is that any commercial facility would have simply said, we are making repairs to our existing structure. We're not altering it. So we're just putting in new lights, new flooring, new glass, new concession stands, new whatever. And they just do it separately and say, well, no, no, these are just mini repairs. They're not alterations. They're just mini repairs. That would have been devastating to basically all commercial facilities because people with disabilities literally would not have had access to commercial facilities. That's why I had to sue my own university was because what they were doing was going to be so detrimental to the overall lives of the people that we care so much about

to allow for them to go to malls and to go to restaurants and to go to hotels and to do any kind of commercial activity. And then ultimately the Department of Justice also intervened on that case because of the federal conceptual notion of it was so intensive that this required, you know, federal intervention as well. That actually then resulted in this establishing all the guidelines and precedents for any commercial facility in the United States as it pertains to the issue of alteration versus repair. So that was established by this case. So you started out your career as an attorney in a small practice, but you were engaged in many cases as taking on a lot of pro bono cases, cases that, you know, you were not making money off of.

Can you tell us a little bit about that process, about how someone who hangs out a shingle and needs to, you know, support the firm was able to go and take on so many pro bono cases? Well, this is going to sound, you know, unusual, but it goes back to kind of my spiritual belief system. When I was in law school, I was struggling to survive. And I was struggling to literally stay in law school. Like each day was a hardship. And there were days that I didn't think I was going to make it. There were days I didn't think I was going to get through it, especially during those cold Chicago winters.

were days I didn't think I was going to get through it, especially during those cold Chicago winters. And what happened was it was a cold February night. And I know this will sound crazy, but I made a promise. I said, Hesham, look, if you give me the chance to become a lawyer, this is my lifelong dream. This is the thing I want more than anything else. But if you give me this opportunity, I promise that I will use it to do something meaningful and that I will use it to do something good. But I need you to help me to get through this. And if you could just simply allow me to graduate, I will dedicate my professional career to representing people with disabilities and special needs who otherwise don't have access to our judicial system. And so ultimately, miraculously, I actually did

graduate from law school, which was miraculous. Even more miraculously, I passed the bar, which was even far more miraculous. And then I went back to my family law firm and I said, look, you know, I know you're going to think this is crazy, but a promise is a promise. And thankfully, my family was supportive and we started our law firm's public services division. You know, we created a public services division. We started the public services division and basically represented folks who otherwise simply didn't have access to the judicial system. And a lot of it is, you know, when you get involved in these kinds of things, a lot of it is that you don't have to take on the University of Michigan. You don't have to take on the city of Detroit. You don't have to take on some massive

entity that's going to crush you. What you have to do is find an injustice or help a person in some way and just be willing to take on a case you otherwise wouldn't have taken or get involved with something you otherwise wouldn't have done. And you can make all the difference in the world. I'm going to jump to sports. You're a marathoner. And tell us about your first marathon. How did you decide to run a marathon with everything going on in your life and how busy it is? Tell me the role that marathoning plays in your life. So, Jay, athletics is everything to me.

So Jay, athletics is everything to me. The reason is, is that, you know, growing up as a, you know, a blind kid, you know, you don't have a lot of self-confidence. I'm speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for others. I'm just speaking for me. And I had a huge issue with confidence. Huge issue.

You know, I was like, you know, one of those awkward people who just couldn't figure out where to fit in. What I used to do is I'd go to gym and I couldn't participate. I couldn't do anything. So they would just put me on the sideline and I would just sit there. And how do you think you think of yourself? Do you think you're cool? Do you think you're a leader? Do you think you're someone that people look up to?

No. Who are the leaders? It's always the athletes. Those are the people that get the respect and the leaders? It's always the athletes. Those are the people that get the respect and the admiration. It's always the athletes. And then I joined a program called Achilles, a guy named Dick Trump, amazing person. He called me and he said, you know, Richard, I was introduced to you by some folks and I think you should join Achilles. And Achilles is dedicated to people like myself who have severe disabilities and the idea is that

you should be able to participate in athletics and it's not about winning or losing it's not about but but it's not doing it's doing endurance competitions about doing things that are hard about doing things that are painful about doing things that have a lot of struggle about difficulty about doing things that are just intense right so Dick, I want you to become a part of Achilles. I remember I joined and I was like, oh my God, what is this? This is insane. I'd never run before, never done any athletic before. And they gave me a team of guides and we went running in the park and they would give directional cues, hard right, soft right, hard left, soft left. And I'd have a tether and hold one side of the tether. The guide would hold the other part. You could feel the motion of their body. And honestly, Jay, what taught me was invaluable because we came, I did one mile the first day. And then Dick said,

okay, you're going to be back here and you do another. We're going to come back and do this again. Next day, I did two miles. I did three. If Dick Trom had told me that I was going to be an Ironman on my first day of Achilles, I would have left and never come back. He didn't say that. He didn't even tell me I was going to be a marathoner. He just said, let's do it one mile at a time. And before you know it, like, I had learned how to run with Achilles. I had learned how to do this.

I was up to like 10 miles and 15 miles and then 18 miles on these long runs. It was like the karate kid we were training without really knowing that we were training and finally dick said to me he says you know rick i'd like you to do the new york city marathon i want you to do it and i did and then i ran one marathon and two and three and five and ten and fifteen and, I got to 24 marathons and then did a full Ironman, which is a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and a 26.2-mile run. But the answer to your question about athletics, which is why it is so unbelievably essential for people with disabilities, is because after I did a marathon, I started suing everybody.

What I mean by that is I had a certain sense of confidence that I now had that I didn't have before. Because once you can do a marathon, you can literally do anything. It's that simple. You work through a marathon, nothing else is as difficult. Again, the Ironman is a whole other kind of extreme level. But the point of the marathon is that once you get through a marathon, you literally will have the strength to get through anything. Doing the city of Detroit isn't really a big deal because I got through a marathon.

So how hard can that be? And it literally affects every decision you make, because you come at it with a different level of understanding about yourself and your ability that you never had before, because athletics gives strength, strength breeds confidence, confidence breeds power, and power breeds results. So I want to bring you to a traumatic incident you had in 2012 when you were severely injured by a speeding cyclist in Central Park in New York City. Can you tell us about that accident and what it did to you and how you moved on from that accident to, again, starting to run after that? I was walking in Central Park. I was in the pedestrian lane.

Now, I've memorized Central Park. I'm there so often. I've memorized the loop. I know the loop cold. So I can walk independently. I don't need a guide. I can do it on my own. I can just take my cane and go for a walk.

And as I was walking, a bicyclist was going, and he was going over 35 miles an hour. He was going really fast. And he veered into the pedestrian lane where I was, and he hit me directly in the back. And it was a catastrophic injury. Like, it was absolutely catastrophic. I was at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital for over 10 weeks. And the thing that

was so hard about it, Jay, was I had to learn how to do everything all over again from the very beginning. And that was so hard. At that point, I was an Ironman. I had done 17 marathons. And literally, I couldn't use the bathroom. I couldn't do a single thing for myself. There was not a single thing that I could do on my own. I'd be lifted. I'd be carried. It was just really something. And when I was in the hospital, I had to find a sense of purpose to this. I had to find a sense of mission. I couldn't just allow this to be some sad thing. I had to find a sense of purpose to this. I had to find a sense of mission. I couldn't just allow this to be some sad thing. I had to find a purpose. I had to find something where I could say, okay, this happened, but it happened for a reason. And I can take that reason and translate it into

something meaningful. So I sued the city of New York. I didn't ask them for any money. I didn't ask them for a dime or a nickel or a cent. I didn't ask them for any money. I didn't ask them for a dime or a nickel or a cent. I didn't ask them for a single thing. I just wanted them to fix the park. I wanted them to make the park safer and make the park better. Didn't ask them for a single nothing. I just wanted the park safer. And God, did we fight.

It was another fight that I did for my hospital bed. But in the end, the city actually wound up making some great changes to the park. It's still not perfect, but they took the traffic out. They resurfaced the roads. So now it's safe to walk on. They've put in all new traffic signals. The idea, hopefully after the pandemic, of adding tunnels, you know, within the park to get people across the road without having to travel across the busy lanes with the bicyclists. Well, Richard, it sounds like you have found a way to take every adversity and make it into a positive. So that's something to other people can, think gain from um from your experience i just want to um end with with um you know you travel a lot i mean we're talking now and you're you're in dubai but you know you've been to ecuador australia many different countries in israel um when you go to is it difficult for you to get around in foreign countries? And do you find certain countries to be more accommodating for people with disabilities? So the answer is

that ultimately, and I'll just bring in the pandemic. For me, the pandemic has been just devastating. You know, I'm a person that works through things and deals with a lot of things. But when we had the lockdown in Michigan, it was excruciating. It was excruciating because people didn't take into account that people like me who are blind need food. And when you shut everything down and you shut Uber down and you tell people that you can't go out of your house, you can't do stuff. In my situation, I was living in an apartment building

that had surges of Corona cases. So people didn't wanna, you couldn't ask people to come and help you because you didn't want them to have to be exposed to you or, you know, come into your building. And so, like, I was on my own because it was understandably because my building had Corona. I will tell you, Jay, that it's almost like you couldn't have created a worse scenario for people with disabilities than a pandemic. Just to give you an example, I had a hard time getting food. I would try to get food, but the grocery stores would tell you that they would deliver it to you, but it would take a month.

It takes a month. What can I do? And then when you made it so that you couldn't use Uber, I mean, what am I supposed to do? And then what they did was all of the restaurants that became takeaway would require you to use apps, but the apps weren't accessible, so I couldn't use the apps. So there was a store in Birmingham, and I love this store, and I'll always be grateful to them, called Beyond Juice. And I went to them and I said, look, I'm having trouble getting food. And I really need your help. I need you to help me figure out a way we can do this. I need to come here in person and give you my credit card and have an in-person transaction. I can't do this without doing this in person. And they had to get special permission from the health department. I mean, it just became

ridiculous. And for one month, Jay, I had the same thing every day. I had a salad and a smoothie because that was all I could get for food. And when they were closed on Sunday, salad and a smoothie because that was all I could get for food. And when they were closed on Sunday, I would have people, you know, eventually like, you know, if someone was going to the grocery store and they were young, like they were young enough that they would be willing to take the risk, I'd ask them, can you buy me something that's like non-perishable? I would say like, can you buy me like peanut butter? So, so Mondays to Saturday, I would eat the Birmingham salad from Beyond Juice. And then on Sunday, because they were closed, I would eat peanut butter just out of the jar, because that was what I would eat was peanut butter. But answering your question about travel and the

pandemic is that people who are blind, like me, need people. We can't function without people. I can't do things without people. If I'm crossing a street, someone's going to come and grab your arm and help you cross the street. The isolation is death for somebody like myself. And look, I'm just going to say this in a very direct way, but being from Detroit, I had five close friends, five close friends who died from Corona. I share that with you, Jay, because I don't want people to think that I minimize at all the dangers and the difficulties that Corona presents. I don't want people to think for a second that I don't understand and don't appreciate and don't recognize the severity of corona. I get it.

I understand it. But having said that and having made that acknowledgement, there has to be a balance. And the balance has to be that there are people that are just being left in the cold. And there are people that are not going to survive this unless society at a certain point, when the vaccine's been distributed to enough people and we reach a certain point, this has to end. And what I mean by that is that this has to come to a point where enough people are vaccinated, where we reach a point where the risk of corona is now balanced with the dangers and hardships that it's presenting in other facets, which is I cannot live under the current scenario that is happening. I'm here in the United Arab Emirates. You ask, where is the best place to go?

You ask, where is the best place to go? For me, the absolute best place to be is the Middle East. Not even a question. In the United States, what has wound up happening is that people have now been conditioned to see everybody as a threat. Everyone is now a threat. So for someone like me, when I want to go, I had to go to CVS to buy some things. And I don't want to have to bring someone to CVS. I'd like to just go to CVS independently.

But Jay, when I go to CVS, I can't approach someone at CVS. What am I going to do? If I walk up to you at CVS and say, hey, can you help me find some toothpaste? Can you help me find the deodorant? Can you help me find some mouthwash? You're going to flip out. Because we have done a phenomenal job of making people scared to the point where someone like me needs assistance or needs help, that people are going to run from you. They're going to run. They're not going to come close to you. You want to cross the street and you need help? No one's going to come over to help you because they're going to see you as a threat. They're going to see you as a danger.

They're not going to want to be close to you because we're so big on social distancing. And I get it. I understand it. I respect it. But we've gone to such an extreme with it that what's wound up happening is that someone like myself who is trying to cross the street or trying to do anything independently, who are coming up on a flight of stairs, people won't come to you. And I love being in the Middle East. I love the UAE. I love Israel. I love any Middle Eastern country. And the reason why, Jay, is because here in the Middle East, people have a balance. What that means is the Middle East culture is one of warmth.

It's one of kindness. It's one of just genuine hosting and hospitality. In the Middle East, yes, people, they will wear masks and they will be cognitive and they will be respectful of the challenges that people are facing. They get it. They understand it. But in the Middle East, people do not do social distancing. They just don't do it. No matter what you tell them, no matter how hard you want to do it, they're not going to do it. So even with the corona here in the Middle East, if somebody sees you struggling,

here in the Middle East, if somebody sees you struggling, they will run to you and they will come to you. They will assist you. They will do anything for you. So the Middle East, the instinctive nature of Middle Eastern people to be of assistance is so ingrained that it usurps the social distancing concepts and confines that have kind of, you know, taken over the United States. Richard, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. You're a good friend. We've known each other for a while. It's a powerful message that you've given us throughout the podcast, but, you know, especially in the end about Corona and the impact on you and, you know, where you feel most safe. on you and where you feel most safe. I don't know if higher office is in your future, but if it is, I think you have a great chance of success. So I want to really thank you for your time.

This has been a great discussion and wish you much health and safety in the coming months. Jake, thank you so much. And thanks to your engineers and your team that put this all together. And I look forward to talking to you again soon. So you guys stay safe and God bless. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. Our key mission is the full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. You can find All Inclusive on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher.

To view the show notes, transcripts, or to learn more, go to rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Have an idea for a podcast? Be sure to tweet at Jay Ruderman.