Beyond Disability Civil Rights
![handle is hein.journals/hastlj58 and id is 1235 raw text is: Beyond Disability Civil Rights
MICHAEL ASHLEY STEIN*
PENELOPE J.S. STEIN**
INTRODUCTION
About io% of the world's population, some six hundred million
people, has a disability.' Disabled persons nevertheless account for 20%
of the world's poorest individuals, a phenomenon that exists across
developing and developed countries.' These impoverished conditions
persist despite efforts by American and international disability rights
advocates to ensure the equality of people with disabilities, as evidenced
by the growing number of countries that have enacted disability-related
legislation.3 Unfortunately, the continuing economic inequities and social
exclusion of disabled persons worldwide severely calls into doubt the
efficacy of these efforts. It also begs the question of whether any country
adequately protects its disabled citizens.
Historically, disability rights advocates have used the social model of
disability to fight for equal treatment. At the forefront of this endeavor,
American advocates expressed the social model of disability through a
civil rights prism whose tenets paralleled earlier advocacy on behalf of
people of color and women.4 Their most significant result was the 1990
promulgation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA),
prohibiting disability-based discrimination.5 As an exemplar of the social
model, the ADA has played a leading role in developing disability law
* Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary School of Law; Visiting Scholar, East Asian
Legal Studies Program Harvard Law School; J.D. Harvard, Ph.D. Cambridge University.
** Visiting Scholar, East Asian Legal Studies Program Harvard Law School; Ph.D. Cambridge
University.
Valuable feedback was received at Harvard, Northeastern, and Renmin workshops.
I. THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE USAID DISABILITY POLICY 2
(2000), available at http://pdf.dec.org/pdf-docs/PDABT61o.pdf.
2. Id.
3. See Theresia Degener & Gerard Quinn, A Survey of International, Comparative and Regional
Disability Law Reform, in DISABILITY RIGHTS LAW AND POLICY: INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL
PERSPECIVES 3, 122-24 (Mary Lou Breslin & Sylvia Yee eds., 2002) (providing a catalogue).
4. See generally JACQUELINE VAUGHN SWITZER, DISABLED RIGHTS: AMERICAN DISABILITY POLICY
AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY (2003).
5. 42 U.S.C. § 12101 (2000).
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Beyond Disability Civil Rights
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