Lunch with Legends: Trailblazers, Trendsetters and Treasures of the Rhode Island Bar, 0217 RIBJ, RIBJ, 65 RI Bar J., No. 4, Pg. 23
| Author | Matthew R. Plain, Esq. Barton Gilman LLP, Providence Stephen Adams, Esq. |
January, 2017
Matthew R. Plain, Esq. Barton Gilman LLP, Providence
Stephen Adams, Esq.
Amy R. Tabor was in born in Chicago in 1949. she moved to Rhode Island when she was nine and her father joined the Economics Department at the University of Rhode Island. She graduated from South Kingstown High School, and then attended the London School of Economics for a year. Amy then attended the University of Michigan, where she majored in history and minored in economics. Upon graduation from college, she moved to Boston and began work at Massachusetts Halfway House, Inc., an organization providing services to individuals released from prison. After one year with the organization, Amy began law school at Northeastern University. She graduated in 1975, passed the bar in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and then joined the firm, McKinnon and Fortunate At McKinnon and Fortunato, she handled primarily criminal defense and civil rights cases, and worked on a number of civil liberties cases with Steve Fortunato on behalf of the ACLU. Amy left the firm in 1981, and joined another industry leader in criminal defense and civil rights, Mann and Roney. She spent roughly three years practicing at Mann and Roney before going out on her own. While on her own, she initially focused on employment discrimination and family law, and served as a cooperating attorney with the ACLU. In the late 1980s, Amy's practice shifted, and she immersed herself in special education law, her current specialty. We had the opportunity to speak with this forty-plus-year veteran of the Rhode Island Bar. Excerpts from our conversation follow.
What made you decide to become a lawyer? Like many people during that time, it was a real sense of idealism, the idea that the law could be one tool to help change the world for the better.
Please describe a really memorable experience that you had as a lawyer.
Two cases always stand out in my mind — one of them was the class action lawsuit against the Rhode Island Truancy System, and Tom Lyons and I were the two Rhode Island attorneys. The Rhode Island Family Court had created a truancy program and magistrates were sent into any school system that agreed to have a magistrate. The idea was a great one. What happened over time was that more and more children were being brought into the...
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