Disability Rights Fellowship

Marisa Leib-Neri joined Brown, Goldstein & Levy as our Disability Rights Fellow in September 2025. She is a disability rights attorney with a passion for justice for the vulnerable members of her community.

Before joining BGL, Marisa served as the Disability Law Fellow at Disability Rights North Carolina. During her two-year fellowship, she represented children with mental health disabilities in the child welfare system and advocated for better investment in community mental health programs. Her fellowship research focused on the overuse of psychotropic medications on children inside residential facilities and the detrimental health effects of overmedication.

Marisa attended the University of Iowa College of Law, where she graduated with public service honors. In law school, she worked as a summer law clerk at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and at Disability Rights Advocates (DRA), assisting on a variety of nationwide class action lawsuits on behalf of individuals with disabilities. She was also a research assistant to Professor Anya Prince and co-published research on issues surrounding genetic testing privacy and genetic discrimination. Marisa served as the Senior Note and Comment Editor for Volume 108 of the Iowa Law Review and published a Note on the topic of marriage rights for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities under guardianship arrangements. She interned for the Iowa Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission to help expand court access for rural Iowans and Iowans with disabilities. She also externed with Disability Rights Iowa, helping with guardianship issues. She was the 2023 recipient of the Iowa College of Law’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Award for her disability advocacy within the Iowa Law community.

Before attending law school, Marisa was a paralegal for three years at the Chicago District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, assisting attorneys in a variety of employment discrimination cases with a focus on failure to accommodate and disability discrimination in the workplace.

Marisa’s interest in disability rights began as a teenager when she helped run a soccer program for children with disabilities. The barriers these children and their families faced every day, as well as her own experience as someone with learning disabilities, sparked an interest in disability advocacy and critical disability studies. During her undergraduate studies at Grinnell College, Marisa designed an independent major in Disability Studies with a focus on the neurodiversity movement and the lived experiences of autistic individuals. She also added a Policy Studies minor—studying the independent living movement and the policies that lead to the lack of affordable, integrated, and accessible housing options for people with disabilities.

*Marisa is licensed to practice law in Iowa and North Carolina and is temporarily practicing law under the supervision of Brown, Goldstein & Levy’s Maryland attorneys while her Maryland bar application is pending.