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55 Ala. L. Rev. 1043 (2003-2004)
Disability, Equality, and Indentity

handle is hein.journals/bamalr55 and id is 1053 raw text is: DISABILITY, EQUALITY, AND IDENTITY Laura L. Rovner* INTRODUCTION One of the undoubted achievements of statutes designed to assist those with impairments is that citizens have an incentive, flowing from a legal duty, to develop a better understanding, a more decent perspective, for accepting persons with impairments or disabilities into the larger society. The law works this way because the law can be a teacher. So I do not doubt that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 will be a milestone on the path to a more decent, tolerant, progressive society.' For over forty years,2 the disability rights movement has sought to re- frame the way people with disabilities are understood by American law, social policy, and society. One of the central tenets of modern disability theory is a shift away from the medical model of disability, which char- acterizes people with disabilities as having pathological individual attrib- utes, typically linked to incapacity and dependence, which in turn may lead to social and economic isolation,3 and toward the view of disability as a socially constructed condition, through which the 'problem' is defined as a dominating attitude by professionals and others, inadequate support services * Associate Professor of Law, Director of Clinical Education Program & Civil Rights Project, University of North Dakota School of Law. This work was facilitated by a University of North Dakota School of Law Webb Summer Research Grant. Thanks are due to the University of Alabama School of Law, the Disability Institute, and the Alabama Law Review for hosting this Symposium. I also wish to thank Kathy Hessler, Margaret Moore Jackson, Arlene Kanter, Randi Mandelbaum, and Kathryn Rand for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. I am especially grateful to Patti Alleva for her interest in and encouragement of this project, and for her willingness to read multiple drafts with the kind of care and attention that come only from exceptional colleagues and friends. Thanks, too, to Janel Frank for capable research assistance and to Rhonda Schwartz for library support. Finally, this Article is dedicated to James and Claire, with love and gratitude. 1. Bd. of Trs. of Univ. of Ala. v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 375 (2001) (Kennedy, J., concurring). 2. While this Article makes reference to the disability rights movement as that which mobilized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in doing so I do not mean to discount earlier efforts of disability advo- cates who sought equality for people with disabilities, such as the League of the Physically Handicapped and the National Federation of the Blind. For a description of some of these early disability rights ef- forts, see, e.g., PAUL K. LONGMORE, WHY I BURNED MY BOOK AND OTHER ESSAYS ON DISABILITY 53- 101 (2003); DORIS ZAMES FLEISCHER & FRIEDA ZAMES, THE DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENT: FROM CHARITY TO CONFRONTATION 5-13, 21-23 (2001). 3. Richard Scotch, Models of Disability and the Americans with Disabilities Act, 21 BERKELEY J. EMP. & LAB. L. 213,219 (2000). 1043

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