Building Connections Between Elder Law And Gerontology

Over the past several decades, elder law has emerged as an important legal specialty. Lawyers, clients, and, law schools are increasingly recognizing the value of the field and its practical and intellectual rigor. Despite this development, however, elder law remains at the periphery of the study of aging and has yet to be meaningfully integrated into the larger field of gerontology.
This lack of integration is unfortunate for two primary reasons. First, elder law practice would benefit from being informed by the larger study of aging. Second, an understanding of elder law is integral to understanding of the experience of growing older.
To investigate the current relationship between elder law and gerontology and opportunities for (and barriers to) connecting the fields, we conducted structured interviews with 27 leading professors of gerontology and elder law in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Interviews were designed to: 1) identify existing attitudes toward elder law among those working in the field of gerontology, and existing attitudes toward gerontology among those working in the field of elder law; 2) identify opportunities for, and barriers to, connecting teaching and scholarship in the two fields.
In this session, we will present our findings related to existing and potential connections between the fields of gerontology and elder law in scholarship and participant suggestions for improving the connection between the fields. Based on these findings, we will then help participants identify steps they might take to connect and integrate the two fields in their scholarship and teaching.