Isaac Lidsky
Legal Times reports that on July 14 Isaac Lidsky, 29, will join the small number of clerks with disabilities who have served the U.S. Supreme Court, but he will be the first blind person.
Tony Mauro writes that "no blind person has taken on the reading-intensive job that entails digesting hundreds of petitions and writing memos and rough drafts of decisions."
He also may be one of the few clerks with an imdb.com profile, because Lidsky is also a former child actor on shows like "Saved by the Bell: The New Class."
Lidsky's father is a Miami attorney and he says "clerking at the Supreme Court has been a dream of his ever since his father, a Cuban-born lawyer in Florida, began telling him as a child about 'this thing called the Supreme Court.'"
Lidsky was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that leads to blindness, about 15 years ago.
He attended Harvard College and then Harvard Law School, worked on the Harvard Law Review, did an appellate clerkship and then one with the Justice Department's Civil Division. Lidsky will clerk for retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Before he starts at the Supreme Court, he will introduce the foundation he created, Hope for Vision, at at gala June 18 in Washington, D.C. Its goal is to build awareness of blinding eye diseases and generate research into possible cures.
