Professor Dietz is a fervent believer in the power of human-animal interaction to promote wellness and in the beginning of the Winter 2024 semester, the DIAL Clinic students were invited to a team building event of Downward Goat Yoga at Erinwood Farm in Southwest Ranches on Sunday, January 14th.
Rachel Lean – Sept. 13 2019
Miami civil rights attorney Matthew W. Dietz has spent 20 years stepping on toes by pushing the envelope on Florida’s Americans with Disabilities policies.
But it wasn’t the path his parents had expected him to follow.
Dietz grew up in a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, attending the same private school that now-disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein later bought and converted into a mansion. Dietz was seemingly destined to continue the family insurance adjusting business.
But there was one problem: He couldn’t stand it.
Family politics and business were a difficult mix, in Dietz‘s veiw. And he’d met Deborah, his future wife, at Boston university.
“As the baby of three children, my parents were not that excited that I had a serious girlfriend that moved back to New York with me, and even less happy when I got engaged,” he said.
Dietz left the family business to elope with Deborah and attend law school, unfortunately sparking a rift between him and his parents that lasted years.
Enter Brooklyn Law School, which Dietz says transformed him from a “hardcore conservative to a hardcore liberal.” He volunteered for the Center for Constitutional Rights and became secretary of the Fourth Amendment committee of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Dietz had assumed knowing criminal procedure mattered most, until one ACLU leader explained their long and honored tradition of disagreeing with the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I thought that was so damn cool, that you could say we could disagree and we could make change, not withstanding what the law says,” Dietz said. “And that stuck with me. To say, ‘OK, the law says this, but I could change it.'”
ADA law wasn’t on the curriculum in the 1990s, so Dietz hadn’t heard of it until he joined a Florida insurance defense firm. In a rare plaintiffs case, he represented a woman who had gotten her arm trapped in a Carnival Cruise Line elevator door while using a walker.
Cruise ships weren’t compliant with the ADA in 1998, when Dietz met quadriplegic attorney Edward Resnick, founder of Access Now Inc.
And Resnick had an idea.
“He was like, ‘Why don’t you sue Carnival to make all their ships accessible?’ I was so incredibly stupid, I thought it was a great idea,” Dietz said. “I was a masochist for thinking I could go against the biggest cruise line in the world.”
Dietz brought a groundbreaking class action lawsuit against Carnival, which settled in 2001.
‘Truth is I never really made a profit’
Dietz fell ill in 2000 with acute pancreatitis, but an epiphany came from his three-month hospital stay: he’d create a law firm for people with disabilities.
“I went out to the Center for Independent Living, and I wanted to meet people in the community and see what their issues were,” Dietz said. “The problems were a lot of their bread-and-butter issues: going to see a doctor, getting transportation, getting accessible housing.”
Dietz soon found that more than 50% of Fair Housing cases were disability-related and took on a case for the HOPE Fair Housing Center involving families blocked from living at a development because they had more than one child per room. He sought an injunction and now represents all Fair-Housing organizations in Florida.
Attitude is the biggest roadblock to accommodations, Dietz says, as people resist change.
“If it doesn’t harm anybody else, what’s the big deal? And if you really can’t think of a big deal, then it’s usually not,” Dietz said.
Dietz‘s firm merged with his nonprofit organization Disability Independence Group in 2014.
“People always ask me, why do I want to be a nonprofit? And the truth is, I never really made a profit beforehand,” Dietz quipped.
President and CEO of HOPE in Miami and Broward Keenya Robertson described Dietz as fierce and focused-the only attorney she’s worked with who has injected himself everywhere the Fair Housing movement went.
“[Dietz] walked away from certain privileges and advantages that he may have had, given his family ties and wealth, to pursue something that he truly believes in,” Robertson said. “He’s that attorney that will go to the mat for you.”
Stephen Hunter Johnson served as opposing counsel in one housing-discrimination case in which Dietz‘s approach to resolving the suit was “unyielding,” but never unreasonable, geared at educating, instead of penalizing defendants.
“Matt’s the type of lawyer that will make you on other side care about the issues and the things he’s advocating for,” Johnson said.
‘He has a name’
Dietz represented someone whom the media often described as “the autistic man with his caretaker Charles Kinsey,” who was shot in 2016 by Miami-Dade police, despite being unarmed.
“The first thing I said is, ‘He has a name. His name is Arnaldo Eliud Rios-Soto,'” Dietz said. “Because the first thing they do is they dehumanize persons with disabilities. They’re invisible, and that’s what allows the state to put them into nursing homes, or put them into other places and shut them away like potted plants.”
Dietz holds a monthly supper social for young adults with developmental disabilities. He hopes to get more people with disabilities into law, believing stigma won’t end until everyone has a seat at the table.
His office is dotted with photos of his son Max, who’s in law school and “much smarter” than him, according to the attorney. Max, who’s autistic, majored in psychology and is conducting a rare study analyzing how autistic people respond to moral dilemma questions.
“There’s always been this misconception that people with autism have a lack of empathy, and he said that’s not so,” Dietz said.
A self-professed “bar junkie,” Dietz negotiated a confidential settlement in March with the Florida Bar Board of Examiners over claims its admissions process was unfair to applicants with a history of mental health or substance abuse problems. Now the board’s changed its rules, Dietz plans to challenge other bar rules he believes create a second class for lawyers with disabilities.
Miles A. McGrane III, former president of the Florida Bar and member of the Florida Board of Bar Examiners, said Dietz has “more exuberance than I’ve ever seen in any lawyer.”
“He worked with the board to improve it, worked against the board when he thought we were wrong,” McGrane said. “But he always did it in a way that you were never offended, even when he was on the other side.”
Dietz‘s desk is furnished with dog treats, as he brings his dog Lucy to work with him. He says he gets at least two calls a week about emotional support animals.
“If it makes life a little bit better, and life is so hard, why not?” he said.
Dietz is also chair of the bar’s animal law section-a position he refused to accept unless he could get a puppy pit, designed to help bar convention attendees relax.
“That was phenomenal,” Dietz said. “I had everybody there hugging dogs, holding dogs. My opposing counsel that had never smiled before at me would smile when I put a dog in her arms. It’s amazing what a puppy could do.”
Dietz introduced goat yoga to the 2019 convention and is pushing for it to qualify for continuing legal education credits.
Win or lose, Dietz said there’s no case he wouldn’t take again.
“They are very few professions where you really do have power,” he said. “And what I view my power as is to give people the power. I give people that believe they are absolutely powerless as much power as the state government. It’s an honor that I’m able to do that.”
If you’re looking for a crusader for justice when it comes to disability and accessibility, NSU Professor Matthew Dietz has the credentials. Since 2022, Dietz has been the clinical director of the Disability Inclusion and Advocacy Law Clinic in NSU’s Shepard Broad College of Law. His commitment to defending those with disabilities runs deep.
Throughout his life, Dietz has struggled with his own disability: a stutter.
“Because of my stutter, I was relentlessly teased, even by family,” he said. “I was embarrassed and tried to hide it as best I could. I carried over my own feelings about myself and my own disability to how I felt and how I treated others.”
Dietz defied opinion when he was told he couldn’t do certain things because of his speech impediment. He used the words of naysayers to motivate him to become a trial lawyer.
While he was studying at Brooklyn Law School, Dietz said, he was told there was no way he could ever become a trial attorney. Undeterred, Dietz was eventually selected for the school’s moot court team.
“It was one of my proudest achievements,” he said. “At that time, my wife Debbie bought me a framed poster with a dog seated at a table, eating a fancy dinner with a glass of red wine. The caption reads, ‘Every dog has his day.’ It hangs in my office at the clinic today.”
Another inspirational piece of artwork that hangs in his office Norman Rockwell’s “Golden Rule.” The print depicts people from various cultures, religions and ethnicities who infuse the golden rule in their beliefs. “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You,” it reads.
Dietz arrived at NSU in summer 2022, after two friends working at the clinic invited him to visit. Since coming to the campus and working with students here, Dietz says the opportunity has been so enjoyable he doesn’t mind his long drive from his home in Miami. He works with a legal clinic’s contingent of 10 students, but he is hoping to grow that number in the future.
Among their activities, he and his students work on discrimination cases, work with families on guardian advocacy matters and form collaborations with other colleges and divisions within NSU.
“My overarching goal of the clinic is to ensure that the college produces students who are competent to practice on day one,” he said. “My hope is that the connection between pure lecture classes and practice with actual clients ‘click’ and students can apply the law to real-life facts.”
Dietz began his career in the 1990s as an insurance defense lawyer, where he received his first exposure to inaccessibility claims and disability law, which was in its infancy as a law practice area. While handling a case, Dietz was referred to noted Miami attorney Edward Resnick. Resnick, a quadriplegic who contracted polio in 1954, grew frustrated with a lifetime of barriers to everyday access and forced businesses to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act when it became enforceable in the 1990s.
“Resnick opened my eyes to how others see a world that is inequitable by design and how disability rights laws were developed to create equity,” Dietz said. “When I went out on my own in 2001, I became more involved in the disability community in South Florida and discovered for myself the wide range of issues and inequity that people with disabilities deal with daily.”
In 2001, Dietz immersed himself in the Florida Bar’s efforts for diversity and inclusion and pressed to include disability into the definition of diversity. Eventually, he and his wife formed Disability Independence Group, a non-profit dedicated to advocating for increased opportunities for people with disabilities, primarily in the legal system.
Over the past 25 years, Dietz has handled hundreds of cases and been involved in more than 350 decisions. During that time, his disdain for civil rights indignities has grown.
“Most civil rights cases involving persons with disabilities are the result of carelessness, ignorance, indifference or thoughtlessness,” he said. “Once you see the inequity, you can’t ‘unsee it.’ I can’t go into a bathroom and not look at the grab bars in the accessible toilet stall or the fixtures on the sink. I scoff when I go to a large presentation and there is not a closed captioning on a screen.”
Among Dietz’s most notable cases:
Dietz notes that in addition to working with “eager and smart students,” the biggest benefit of coming to NSU is the opportunity to be in a college of law that is part of a larger university that provides interdisciplinary opportunities.
“Being a lawyer is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end,” he said. “We live in a society where those who serve people with disabilities need to have an understanding of the law and the remedies that ensure jobs, housing, education or other benefits. Lawyers play a crucial role of facilitating that understanding and ensuring that these benefits are carried out.”
