Socio-Legal Backlash
![handle is hein.journals/berkjemp21 and id is 482 raw text is: Afterword: Socio-Legal Backlash
Linda Hamilton Kriegert
INTRODUCTION
In a Comment appearing earlier in this volume,' Professor Mike Wald
suggests that, at this point in its history, the disability movement's heavy reliance
on law may represent its greatest problem. At the March 1999 Symposium
meetings, this notion provoked a great deal of discussion-and no small measure of
consternation-among disability activists who rejoined that the right to assert a
legal claim to access had transformed their individual and collective self-
conceptions and their relationship to society. Law, in this view, had brought the
movement a long, long way.
On the other hand, one found broad based agreement among Symposium
participants that, in many critical respects, implementation of the Americans with
Disabilities Act was not unfolding as its supporters had planned. Whether decrying
the crabbed constructions of the ADA characterizing federal judicial decisions or
excavating derisive media portrayals of the Act's beneficiaries and enforcers,
Symposium presenters, commenters, and audience participants repeatedly
lamented, They just don't get it.
Professor Wald's suggestion that the movement may be over-relying on the
power of law to transform culture and disability activists' frustrated observations
that people outside the disability community just don't get the ADA may point in
the same direction. Both suggest that the ADA, at least as its drafters conceived it,
somehow got too far ahead of most people's ability to understand the social and
moral vision on which it was premised.
Curiously, one of the more obscure definitions of backlash metaphorically
describes precisely such a condition. The Webster's Third New International
Dictionary defines backlash, among other ways, as a snarl in that part of a fishing
line which is wound on the spool, caused by overrunning of the spool. The image
here is one of a fishing reel that has been overcast-that has gotten ahead of
itself-and has for that reason become entangled. Backlash, this image suggests,
has something to do with one part of a process or mechanism getting too far ahead
of another.
t Acting Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall); A.B. Stanford
University, 1975; J.D. New York University School of Law, 1978. Many people have contributed to this endeavor. In
particular, I wish to thank Catherine Groves, my editor at the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Beth
Pherson and Shawna Parks, who provided outstanding research assistance, and colleagues Stephen Bundy, Lauren
Edelman, ]an Haney-Lopez, Christopher Kurz, Robert MacCoun, Robert Post, and Stephen Sugarman for research
leads and comments on earlier drafts.
1. Michael Wald, Comment: Moving Forward, Some Thoughts on Strategies, 21 BERKELEY J. EMP. & LAB.
L. 472 (2000).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/berkjemp21&div=23&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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