Elon Law faculty member honored for advocacy for deaf community

Drew Simshaw, a Legal Method & Communication Fellow, received the H. Latham Breunig Humanitarian Award this summer from TDI at the organization's biennial conference. 

A new member of the Elon Law faculty was honored this summer for his legal advocacy work on issues related to accessibility of communications technologies, including television captioning, accessible user interfaces, and the adoption and deployment of real-time text technology.

Drew Simshaw, a Legal Method & Communication Fellow, received the H. Latham Breunig Humanitarian Award from Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc. at TDI’s 22nd biennial conference. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the program or activities of TDI.

Before joining the Elon Law faculty, Simshaw served as a Clinical Teaching Fellow and Staff Attorney for the Institute for Public Representation, Georgetown Law’s nationally prominent clinical center. He taught in the Communications and Technology Law Clinic, where he worked with students on behalf of public interest clients on media and privacy-related issues before the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and federal appellate courts. 

Many of the filings he helped produce on TDI’s behalf were assisted by his law school clinical students.

“Thanks to his guidance and example, these interns established their legal careers with the awareness of laws, rules, and regulations that ensures full accessibility for all Americans, with and without disabilities, in telecommunications, media, and information services,” TDI stated in its award announcement.

TDI was established in 1968 to promote further distribution of teletypewriters in the deaf community and to publish an annual national directory of TTY numbers. It has evolved into a national advocacy organization focused on addressing equal access issues in telecommunications and media for people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, late-deafened and deafblind.

Simshaw is a graduate of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and will receive an LLM in Advocacy from Georgetown this fall. He publishes in the areas of privacy, technology, and communications law.