After more than 36 years of service, DREDF attorney Linda D. Kilb will retire from the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF) on September 30, 2025.
Linda first joined DREDF in January 1989, fresh out of law school and at the beginning of what she thought would be a nine-month position. Instead, she built a decades-long career that has profoundly shaped disability rights law, policy, and community. Her unwavering dedication, brilliance, and generosity have been a guiding light to generations of advocates and a force for justice for people with disabilities nationwide.
Throughout her time at DREDF, Linda helped define and advance the core principles of powerful social justice movements: the Disability Rights Movement, the Independent Living Movement and the Civil Legal Services Movement. She led with deep historical insight, legal rigor, and a passion for equity that never waned. Her career exemplifies what it means to be a movement lawyer: steadfast, visionary, and accountable to the community.
As Linda steps away from the practice of law, she turns toward a new chapter: the American Timelines Project. The project will be a sweeping interdisciplinary history initiative to make U.S. legislative and executive primary sources more accessible, contextualized alongside the historical narratives often left untaught. It will include disability rights and civil legal services history. But it will take a wider lens, exploring the entirety of American legal history, as it has developed within American history as a whole. Through this project, Linda will continue to shape the stories that inform justice work and public understanding, just as she always has.
After September 30, Linda welcomes ongoing conversation, collaboration, and connection at Kilb.American.Timelines@gmail.com. This is a contact she encourages all to share freely.
We at DREDF are endlessly grateful to Linda. We are better because of her. The disability and civil rights movements are stronger because of her. And the future, led by the advocates she has mentored, is brighter because of her enduring example.
Thank you, Linda. We’ll see you in the history books—you’re already there.