Legal help for those with HIV/AIDS

Since 1988, a Philadelphia nonprofit practice has been helping clients suffering from the disease.

By Joseph A. Slobodzian

Inquirer Staff Writer

The case was perfect for the Philadelphia-based AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania.

The client was a 56-year-old man with AIDS, legally blind and with heart disease, desperately needing nursing home care. A local facility declined to care for him because its employees would be "uncomfortable" with an AIDS patient.

What made the case unusual was that it happened not in the late '80s, when the epidemic was new, the facts few and the myths plentiful, but in April.

Executive director Ronda B. Goldfein says the case of the Williamsport, Pa., man - now the subject of fair housing complaints before state and federal agencies - is why the AIDS Law Project is needed and is thriving after 15 years.

Despite strides made in educating the public about HIV and AIDS and the ways in which the virus is transmitted, ignorance and discrimination persist.

"Our biggest problem is the perception that [the epidemic is] over," Goldfein said.

But the epidemic continues and patients' needs haven't changed, they've just evolved with increased medical knowledge, improved drug treatments and longer life spans. So too have their legal needs.

In the beginning, Goldfein said, the issue was discrimination: people rejected for jobs, fired, or denied promotions; denied health-insurance coverage for expensive treatment; or denied access to housing and public services.

Of the 1,700 calls the AIDS Law Project gets annually, Goldfein said, only about 10 percent now involve alleged discrimination because of AIDS or HIV status. Today's clients, she said, are more likely looking for legal help to remain at home as the disease progresses, to obtain disability benefits, write wills or arrange trusts for their children.

"This is all because... [people with HIV] are alive and well," Goldfein said.

One thing has not changed: The AIDS Law Project remains free and the nation's only independent, nonprofit public-interest law center devoted to the legal needs of people with HIV and AIDS.

In other cities, social service groups formed to respond to the epidemic, such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, which brought in lawyers to serve clients.

Goldfein said the AIDS Law Project board has rejected overtures to merge with social agencies or larger law firms.

"We feel our clients need to know that this is an independent place to go where there are no divided allegiances," Goldfein said.

As recalled by founder David W. Webber, 48, independence was almost accidental.

In 1984, Webber was four years out of Temple law school after trading an undergraduate degree in musicology for a legal career. Webber said he was trying to carve out a solo practice in employment-discrimination law and began exploring the emerging area of gay legal rights.

David Kairys, a law professor at Temple and a civil rights lawyer, said that Webber shared office space with him and partner David Rudovsky in Center City and "began writing wills for gay people."  

Although Pennsylvania does not legally recognize gay unions, Kairys said Webber figured out how to use established law to carry out gay couples' wishes.

"He had so many gay people coming in to see him that we were running out of room in our waiting room," Kairys said.

Webber's contacts in the gay community, he said, led him to become legal director of the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force in 1984.

"They were running a social services agency," Webber said, "but the social workers were having problems getting lawyers. They had no money and the clients certainly didn't have any money to pay."

Webber said he started working one day a week on AIDS cases but the number of desperate, often dying, clients soon outstripped his time and finances.

The solution, Webber said, became obvious: "I really wasn't making a profit, so my idea was to make it a real nonprofit."

In October 1988, the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania was born.

Less than a year later, Webber's group won Philadelphia's first AIDS discrimination case against a funeral director who had refused to bring the body of an AIDS patient into his funeral home.

"I tell my law students," Kairys said, "that [Webber] is an example of a lawyer who succeeded by seeing a group of clients whose basic legal needs were unmet.

"It was rather courageous because this was in a day when it was all rumor and little was known about how AIDS was spread."

By 1992, Webber said, the AIDS Law Project's client list was burgeoning and he was "burning out" fighting for clients who sometimes died as he was close to winning their cases.

"We used to estimate that we would get a new generation of clients every 18 months," Webber said.

So in 1992, Webber left the organization he founded, opting to write and focus on major cases with legal or public-policy significance.

Webber's spot was taken by staff lawyer Nan Feyler. Coincidentally that year, Goldfein joined as a volunteer lawyer.

Goldfein, a lawyer for six years, said she was dissatisfied with working for a law firm representing asbestos companies. She was also still feeling the impact of losing two friends to AIDS.

Within six months she began working on a case that two years later resulted in the nation's first settlement involving AIDS under the new Americans With Disabilities Act.

Under the agreement, the Philadelphia Fire Department agreed to provide AIDS education to more than 2,000 firefighters and emergency personnel. The AIDS Law Project and the U.S. Justice Department had sued on behalf of a Philadelphia student who was refused care by a city rescue crew after they learned he had AIDS.

In 2000, after Feyler resigned to pursue a master's degree in public health, Goldfein became executive director.

In addition to editing and contributing to the annual publication AIDS and the Law, Webber, 48, is editor-in-chief of AIDS & Public Policy Journal and a champion for nonprescription availability of hypodermic syringes in Pennsylvania.

Goldfein, meanwhile, said she was planning to remain with the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania and to make the organization truly reflect its name and the increasing number of its potential clients.

"We need an office in Western Pennsylvania," she said.

Contact staff writer Joseph A. Slobodzian at 215-854-2658 or jslobodzian@phillynews.com