Antiracism & Social Justice Resources

"This Commentary provides the first comprehensive legal article-by-article analysis of the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The Convention is the key international human rights instrument exclusively devoted to persons with disabilities and the centerpiece of international efforts to address inequalities and barriers they encounter to the full enjoyment of human rights. The book discusses the Convention's position within existing international human rights law and within the framework of the United Nations measures to protect the rights of people with disabilities. Starting with the background of all the Convention's articles, including the travaux pr��paratoires, this Commentary examines each provision's substance and interpretation, and explores the significance of each right, its legal scope and relationship with other international legal norms and principles. A unique contribution also analyzes the Optional Protocol to the Convention. In addition to enriching academic studies of international human rights law, the book provides insights into the practical operation of the Convention's provisions by assessing the practice of the CRPD Committee, the activities of relevant international and regional human rights bodies in enforcing the rights of persons with disabilities and the contracting parties' implementation practices. Relevant European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union and, if appropriate, other regional jurisdictions' case law, as well as the jurisprudence of domestic courts, are taken into consideration. Contributions from leading scholars and international experts make this book an indispensable resource for lawyers, academics, students, journalists, international organizations, NGOs and other stakeholders wanting to better understand the rights of people with disabilities. Furthermore, it makes a valuable contribution to appraising the impact of the Convention in the legal orders of contracting parties and to charting the way forward in the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities." --Cover.

Looks at how the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) addresses or fails to address the world of discrimination for 2 groups of individuals with mental disabilities: (1) those who are part of mainstream America--successful actors, politicians, lawyers, and writers who report that other people minimize or refuse to believe their struggles and symptoms; and (2) those who are publicly identified as "mentally ill" by being institutionalized or on public disability benefits who report that they are considered totally incapable of any kind of achievement. The author examines ADA cases in a variety of areas, from private insurance and professional discipline to disability benefits and institutionalization. The common thread underlying discrimination is the failure to recognize that mental disabilities involve a continuing struggle that can--and often does--coexist with achievement and success. This book is a resource for lawyers, people with mental disabilities, therapists, and anyone who seeks to understand the full impact of disability law. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, municipal laws targeting 'unsightly beggars' sprang up in cities across America. This book uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring the details of the laws.

"The book is about NON-custodial suicide, i.e., people within the criminal justice system committing suicide, including defendants and lawyers"--

"The book is about the law, history, public policy, administrative agency processes, and empirical and American labor market realities, around the elusive Social Security Act disability programs' requirements for determining when persons can make adjustments to jobs which exist in significant numbers in the economy"-- Provided by publisher.

Sexuality, Disability, and the Law approaches issues of sexual autonomy and disability from multiple perspectives, including constitutional law, international human rights, therapeutic jurisprudence, history, cognitive psychology, dignity studies, and theories and findings on gender constructs and societal norms. Perlin and Lynch determine that if our society continues to assert that persons with mental disabilities possess a primitive morality, we allow ourselves to censor their feelings and their actions. By denying their ability and desires to show love and affection, we justify this disparate treatment. Our reliance on stereotypes has warped our attitudes and our policies, and has allowed us to avoid important issues of humanity and of dignity that should be at the basis of any policies that affect this population.

"On the surface, America's commitment to equal opportunity in the workplace has never been clearer. Virtually every company has antidiscrimination policies in place, and there are laws designed to protect these rights across a range of marginalized groups. But, as Ellen Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen compellingly show, this progressive vision of the law falls far short in practice. When aggrieved individuals turn to the law, the adversarial character of litigation imposes considerable personal and financial costs that make plaintiffs feel like they've lost regardless of the outcome of the case. Employer defendants also are dissatisfied with the system, often feeling "held up" by what they see as frivolous cases. And even when the case is resolved in the plaintiff's favor, the conditions that gave rise to the lawsuit rarely change. In fact, the contemporary approach to workplace discrimination law perversely comes to reinforce the very hierarchies that antidiscrimination laws were created to redress. Based on rich interviews with plaintiffs, attorneys, and representatives of defendants and an original national dataset on case outcomes, Rights on Trial reveals the fundamental flaws of workplace discrimination law and offers practical recommendations for how we might better respond to persistent patterns of discrimination." -- Publisher's website

"This book is meant to cover the complete anatomy of a criminal case, from the initial encounter with law enforcement, through the bond hearing, through the use of experts, through plea bargaining or dismissal, through resolution, including a sentencing hearing to prison or probation"--

"In many countries around the world persons with disabilities still suffer torture, ill- treatment and severe discrimination. Sometimes they are persecuted directly by the state, but frequently it is their family members, society or religious institutions that expose them to serious harm, while the state turns a blind eye to it. Persons with disabilities make up approximately 15% of the world population and an estimated 20% of the population of refugees and internally displaced persons. This book examines when persons with disabilities, who are being persecuted for reasons of their disability, are refugees and thus entitled to the protection of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol"--

Cultural Writing. "Our wrists hurt from typing on our too flat keyboards. We put the TV on 'mute' when it gets to noisy in the bar, and follow the action with the captions. We duck into the `handicap stall' at the airport because it's big enough to accommodate us--and our rollbag and our computer bag. Still, we say, the disabled are ruining things for society. They want special keyboards at work to help them type. They want accessible restrooms everywhere. They want more captioning on television. They're always wanting special accommodations"--from MAKE THEM GO AWAY. "This book from long-time disability social issues reporter Mary Johnson is indispensable. It's the genuine article--Johnson was there"--Marta Russell.

"A valuable library resource for employers, educators, & even the most sophisticated practitioner dealing with the rights of Americans with disabilities." says Robert Silverstein, Esq., Staff Director of the Senate Subcommittee on Disability Policy, who also reports that authors Tucker & Goldstein have "done an outstanding job examining this complex area of federal authority & have produced a treatise that is thoroughly researched, well annotated, & exhaustively analyzed." The book provides an analysis of laws enacted by Congress to eliminate the major types of discrimination confronted by Americans with disabilities who seek to participate in the mainstream of society. Topics covered include employment, education, public accommodations, housing, transportation, access to services, the elimination of architectural barriers, & disabled newborns. "This book has it all" - David M. Capozzi, Project ACTION. Familiarity with the primary issues, laws & cases dealing with those topics will introduce - & sensitize - the reader to the depth of the discrimination faced by Americans with disabilities, & to the scope of awareness & effort required to alleviate that discrimination. While analyzing these laws, the authors often leave you pondering the justice of certain decisions, the ambiguity of existing law, the necessity for further legislation, & the dilemmas of reality.

"This new, completely revised edition of Legal Rights: The Guide for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People meticulously describes the federal and state statutes that prohibit discrimination against deaf and hard of hearing people. Written in easy-to-understand language, the sixth edition explains critically important legislation such as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It also includes the recent amendments to these laws -- the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) and new regulations to its Title II concerning public entities and Title III pertaining to public accommodations and commercial facilities; and the reauthorization of IDEA, which expanded the No Child Left Behind Act requirement of highly qualified teachers to include all students with disabilities. This updated edition of Legal Rights tracks the trend of passing a Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children's Bill of Rights in a growing number of state legislatures. It delineates new federal legislation such as the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which ensures that deaf and hard of hearing people have access to the newest communications technology. Legal Rights also provides vital information on health care and social services, fair housing regulations, employment, and the use of interpreters in the legal system, securing its position as the most comprehensive source of legal information for deaf and hard of hearing people now available." -- Back cover

Refugees living with disabilities are often forgotten or invisible during acute crises of human displacement. This groundbreaking work examines the experiences of persons with disabilities who have crossed borders in search of protection from disasters or conflict, and analyses the existing legal frameworks for their protection. The authors deftly explore the intersection between one of the oldest international human rights treaties, the 1951 Refugee Convention, with one of the newest, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Drawing on pioneering fieldwork in six countries - Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uganda, Jordan and Turkey - this book examines how the CRPD is, or should be, changing the way that governments and aid agencies engage with and accommodate refugees with disabilities. Its timeliness is underscored by the adoption in 2016 of the UN Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action at the World Humanitarian Summit. Engaging and thought-provoking, this book will captivate any scholar studying international law, development, disability rights and refugee and forced migration studies. It is also an imperative resource for practitioners and policymakers in the humanitarian and development sector, as well as international human rights organisations--

This inspiring book contains letters of encouragement and advice from lawyers with disabilities to law students and new lawyers with disabilities. The writers share their perspectives on work and disability, based on their own experiences of success and setbacks.

This publication is a valuable resource for lawyers who are counseling clients who are considering the purchase of individual or group disability coverage, as it discusses all the many definitions of disability. It explains the types of coverage and the related terminology, as well as how to achieve full protection.

Richard A. Courtney is a Certified Elder Law Attorney through the National Elder Law Foundation who also practices in areas including special needs planning, trusts and trust administration, and nursing home and disability rights. He has been named in Best Lawyers in America in Elder Law and Trusts & Estates since 2013. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys and of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. Four decades ago, Courtney was thrust into the arena of special needs law on a personal basis as a parent of a child with disabilities. Since that time, he has gained substantial experience, personally and professionally, with the legal issues involved, such as Medicaid, SSI, housing, asset protection, special needs estate planning, and incapacity planning. This book gives general practitioners and less experienced special needs attorneys the background and basic information on these and other issues, as well as the planning techniques and legal strategies needed to counsel and assist clients with special needs. Book jacket.

The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 was hailed as revolutionary legislation, but in the ensuing years restrictive Supreme Court decisions have prompted accusations that the Court has betrayed the disability rights movement. The ADA can lay claim to notable successes, yet people with disabilities continue to be unemployed at extremely high rates. In this timely book, Samuel R. Bagenstos examines the history of the movement and discusses the various, often-conflicting projects of diverse participants. He argues that while the courts deserve some criticism, some may also be fairly aimed at the choices made by prominent disability rights activists as they crafted and argued for the ADA. The author concludes with an assessment of the limits of antidiscrimination law in integrating and empowering people with disabilities, and he suggests new policy directions to make these goals a reality.

"In Land Use Law and Disability, Robin Paul Malloy argues that our communities need better planning to be safely and easily navigated by people with mobility impairment and to facilitate intergenerational aging in place. To achieve this, communities will need to think of mobility impairment and inclusive design as land use and planning issues, in addition to understanding them as matters of civil and constitutional rights. Although much has been written about the rights of people with disabilities, little has been said about the interplay between disability and land use regulation. This book undertakes to explain mobility impairment, as one type of disability, in terms of planning and zoning. The goal is to advance our understanding of disability in terms of planning and zoning to facilitate cooperative engagement between disability rights advocates and land use professionals. This in turn should lead to improved community planning for accessibility and aging in place"--

"This book provides an overview of disability exceptions to copyright infringement and the international legal framework for disability rights and exceptions. The focus is on those exceptions as they apply to visual art, while the book presents a comprehensive study of copyright's disability exceptions per se, and the international human rights law framework in which they are situated."--

The book examines the basis of discrimination against people with disabilities, including the history of such discrimination and a review of studies that explore why people engage in this sort of discrimination. It examines the federal laws that culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The book describes the ADA's definition of disability, how it has been interpreted and studied, and then reviews the three major titles of the ADA, including a review of the remedies available for various ADA claims and the procedures required to pursue them.

In this book, the author reveals a pattern of prejudice against mentally disabled individuals that keeps them from receiving equal treatment under the law. Sanism, like racism, is a prejudice against a minority population. This mostly hidden prejudice against mentally ill people has pervaded Western culture throughout history, and the author documents how sanism continues to affect our culture and legal system. Under the pretext of "improving" society, a judge, lawyer, or fact-finder may ignore faulty evidence. This testimonial dishonesty is often based on the false belief that the mentally disabled are not responsible or intelligent enough to deserve the full rights of citizenship. The author argues that these are sanist decisions and explores the roots and results of these decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Now that curb cuts, braille elevator buttons, and closed caption television are commonplace, many people assume that disabled people are now full participants in American society. This book tells a rather different story. It tells how America's disabled mobilized to effect sweeping changes in public policy, not once but twice, and it suggests that the struggle is not yet over. The first edition of From Good Will to Civil Rights traced the changes in federal disability policy, focusing on the development and implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Richard K. Scotch's extensive interviews with policymakers, leaders of the disability rights movement, and other advocates, supplemented the sketchy official history of the legislation with the detailed, behind-the-scenes story, illuminating the role of the disability rights movement in shaping Section 504. Charting the shifts in policy and activist agendas through the 1990's, this new edition surveys the effects and disappointments associated with the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, in the context of the continuing movement to secure civil rights for disabled people.

"Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement. Traditionally, disabled people were regarded as objects of pity and condescension. The rise of the social model of disablement--which identifies barriers, rather than physiological impairments, as the main problem facing people with disabilities--has resulted in a dramatic reconfiguration of how we regard political and legal structures affecting people with disabilities. Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this volume explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). This original contribution deepens our knowledge of the role of people with disabilities within social movements in disability history. The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change."--

Disability offers a new lens through which to view the effectiveness of access to justice, and the inclusiveness of the justice system as a whole. This book analyses the experience of people with disabilities through the entire justice system, from making a complaint, to investigation, and through the court/tribunal process. It also considers the participation of people with disabilities in a variety of roles in the justice system - as witness, defendant, complainant, plaintiff, lawyer, judge and juror. More broadly, it also critically examines the subtle barriers of access to justice which might exist in a given society - including barriers to grassroots disability advocacy, legal education and training, the right to vote and the right to stand for election which may apply to people with disabilities. The book is international and comparative in scope with a focus primarily on examples of legal practice and justice systems in common law countries. The work will be of interest to scholars working in the areas of human rights, equality and non-discrimination, disability rights activists and legal professionals who work with people with disabilities to achieve access to justice.

This text ventures into the area where law and disability intersect. Drawing on developments in the emerging field of disability studies and on a new-found human rights perspective on disability, the contributions traverse topics as wide-ranging as citizenship, feminism, eugenics, euthanasia, and sexual abuse of people with disabilities, and analyze disability law at both a domestic and international level. Informed by the social model of disability, this work brings together academics and disability activists from Australia, Europe and North America. The book is interdisciplinary in nature, with contributors coming from sociology, education, law, geography, philosophy, and cultural studies.

The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CPRD) by the United Nations in 2006 is the first comprehensive and binding treaty on the rights of people with disabilities. It establishes the right of people with disabilities to equality, dignity, autonomy, full participation, as well as the right to live in the community, and the right to supported decision-making and inclusive education. Prior to the CRPD, international law had provided only limited protections to people with disabilities. This book analyses the development of disability rights as an international human rights movement. Focusing on the United States and countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East the book examines the status of people with disabilities under international law prior to the adoption of the CPRD, and follows the development of human rights protections through the convention's drafting process. Arlene Kanter argues that by including both new applications and entirely new approaches to human rights treaty enforcement, the CRPD is significant not only to people with disabilities but also to the general development of international human rights, by offering new human rights protections for all people. Taking a comparative perspective, the book explores how the success of the CRPD in achieving protections depends on the extent to which individual countries enforce domestic laws and policies, and the changing public attitudes towards people with disabilities. This book will be of excellent use and interest to researchers and students of human rights law, discrimination, and disability studies.

"This volume illuminates the unique challenges faced by deaf people when they are arrested, incarcerated, or navigating the court system"--

Crippled Justice, the first comprehensive intellectual history of disability policy in the workplace from World War II to the present, explains why American employers and judges, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been so resistant to accommodating the disabled in the workplace. Ruth O'Brien traces the origins of this resistance to the postwar disability policies inspired by physicians and psychoanalysts that were based on the notion that disabled people should accommodate society rather than having society accommodate them. O'Brien shows how the remnants of postwar cultural values bogged down the rights-oriented policy in the 1970s and how they continue to permeate judicial interpretations of provisions under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In effect, O'Brien argues, these decisions have created a lose/lose situation for the very people the act was meant to protect. Covering developments up to the present, Crippled Justice is an eye-opening story of government officials and influential experts, and how our legislative and judicial institutions have responded to them.

Increasing numbers of people with autism and other developmental disabilities are being convicted of sex offences, resulting in draconian and public punishment. Yet even when evidence shows that people with these conditions often pose little threat to society, or lack a core understanding as to why their actions break the law, the "sex offender legal regime" doesn't allow any room to take the disability into account. This ground-breaking book offers a multi-disciplinary examination of how unjust sex offense laws trap vulnerable groups such as those with developmental disabilities. Drawing on research, empirical evidence and including case studies, experts from the fields of law, ethics, psychology and sociology explore what steps should be taken in order to ensure that laws are just and take into consideration factors such as the vulnerability of the perpetrators. Investigating the consequences caused by public hysteria over sex offenses, this book highlights the judicial failure to protect defendants with developmental disabilities in the context of the unjust and hyper-punishment of all those charged with sex offenses. Proposing a new way forward based on research and evidence-based sentencing for sex offenses, and elimination of the sex offender registry, this book offers an informed and compassionate view that is essential for all professionals working in this field.

In this groundbreaking work, leading philosophers, legal theorists, bioethicists, and policy makers offer incisive looks into the philosophical and moral foundations of disability law and policy.