History of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

The first significant book on the history and impact of the ADA-the "eyes on the prize" moment for disability rights The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, and it has become the model for disability-based laws around the world. Yet the surprising story behind how the bill came to be is little known. In this riveting account, acclaimed disability scholar Lennard J. Davis delivers the first behind-the-scenes and on-the-ground narrative of how a band of leftist Berkeley hippies managed to make an alliance with upper-crust, conservative Republicans to bring about a truly bipartisan bill. Based on extensive interviews with all the major players involved including legislators and activists, Davis recreates the dramatic tension of a story that is anything but a dry account of bills and speeches. Rather, it's filled with one indefatigable character after another, culminating in explosive moments when the hidden army of the disability community stages scenes like the iconic "Capitol Crawl" or an event some describe as "deaf Selma," when students stormed Gallaudet University demanding a "Deaf President Now!" From inside the offices of newly formed disability groups to secret breakfast meetings surreptitiously held outside the White House grounds, here we meet countless unsung characters, including political heavyweights and disability advocates on the front lines. "You want to fight?" an angered Ted Kennedy would shout in an upstairs room at the Capitol while negotiating the final details of the ADA. Congressman Tony Coelho, whose parents once thought him to be possessed by the devil because of his epilepsy, later became the bill's primary sponsor. There's Justin Dart, adorned in disability power buttons and his signature cowboy hat, who took to the road canvassing fifty states, and people like Patrisha Wright, also known as "The General," Arlene Myerson or "the brains," "architect" Bob Funk, and visionary Mary Lou Breslin, who left the hippie highlands of the West to pursue equal rights in the marble halls of DC. Published for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ADA, Enabling Acts promises to ignite readers in a discussion of disability rights by documenting this "eyes on the prize" moment for tens of millions of American citizens.

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This Nutshell presents an overview of the major federal disability laws with emphasis on the statutes, regulations, and significant points of substantive and procedural law. The sixth edition includes significant focus on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including its 2008 Amendment and accompanying regulations. Features coverage on constitutional rights; the definition of 'disabled'; Rehabilitation Act of 1973; employment discrimination; programs and services; and housing, education, and transportation. Also reviews the many relevant areas of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), including the 2004 Amendments and two recent Supreme Court cases under the IDEA.

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 explore 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). The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to transform their environment by changing the discourse surrounding disablement.

Explaining in clear and simple terms the legislation, administrative regulations, and case law of the Americans with Disabilities Act, this handbook goes beyond the myths and offers a virtual road map to the law as well as a framework for dealing with the ADA in a preventive manner. By reviewing the ADA in the context of real-world situations, the book brings clarity and perspective to this important area of the law. Each concise chapter, written in plain English, covers an area of the ADA, its practical application, and its anticipated future evolution. It also includes useful forms and checklists. Some of the many important topics considered include: The true definition of a disability under the ADA Essential functions, major life activities, and tasks: what they are and what they mean What constitutes undue hardship for employers The concept of good faith and steps to ensure a defendant will meet the standard Drug and alcohol abuse: when they are and are not disabilities How reasonable modification is defined and interpreted New and existing commercial public facilities and their architectural requirements Delving into many of the complex topics of disability claims and reflecting ADA cases decided by the Supreme Court and appellate courts, this updated edition offers expanded guidance on remedies if the law is violated; advice on when you have a right to sue; the statute of limitations for claims; and whether a class-action is a viable thing to pursue. Written from the perspective of a lawyer with a disability (the author was born with a severe to profound hearing loss and wears hearing aids), this to-the-point guide demonstrates that the Americans with Disabilities Act is not just a law, but a way of life."

Rights of Inclusion provides an innovative, accessible perspective on how civil rights legislation affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Based on eye-opening and deeply moving interviews with intended beneficiaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger argue for a radically new understanding of rights-one that focuses on their role in everyday lives rather than in formal legal claims. Although all sixty interviewees had experienced discrimination, none had filed a formal protest or lawsuit. Nevertheless, civil rights played a crucial role in their lives. Rights improved their self-image, enhanced their career aspirations, and altered the perceptions and assumptions of their employers and coworkers-in effect producing more inclusive institutional arrangements. Focusing on these long-term life histories, Engel and Munger incisively show how rights and identity affect one another over time and how that interaction ultimately determines the success of laws such as the ADA.

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Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames expand their encyclopaedic history of the struggle for disability rights in the United States, to include the past ten years of disability rights activism. The book includes a new chapter on the evolving impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the continuing struggle for cross-disability civil and human rights, and the changing perceptions of disability. The authors provide a probing analysis of such topics as deinstitutionalization, housing, health care, assisted suicide, employment, education, new technologies, disabled veterans, and disability culture. Based on interviews with over one hundred activists,The Disability Rights Movementtells a complex and compelling story of an ongoing movement that seeks to create an equitable and diverse society, inclusive of people with disabilities.

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For civil rights lawyers who toiled through the 1980s in the increasingly barren fields of race and sex discrimination law, the approval of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 by a nearly unanimous U.S. House and Senate and a Republican President seemed almost fantastic. Within five years of the Act's effective date, however, observers were warning of an unfolding assault on the ADA by federal judges, the media, and other national opinion-makers. A year after the Supreme Court issued a trio of decisions in the summer of 1999 sharply limiting the ADA's reach, another decision invalidated an entire title of the act as it applied to the states. By this time, disability activists and disability rights lawyers were speaking openly of a backlash against the ADA. What happened, why did it happen, and what can we learn from the patterns of public, media, and judicial response to the ADA that emerged in the 1990s? In this book, a distinguished group of disability activists, disability rights lawyers, social scientists and humanities scholars grapple with these questions. Taken together, these essays construct and illustrate a new and powerful theoretical model of sociolegal change and retrenchment that can inform both the conceptual and theoretical work of scholars and the day-to-day practice of social justice activists. Contributors include Lennard J. Davis, Matthew Diller, Harlan Hahn, Linda Hamilton Krieger, Vicki A. Laden, Stephen L. Percy, Marta Russell, and Gregory Schwartz. Backlash Against the ADA will interest disability rights activists, lawyers, law students and legal scholars interested in social justice and social change movements, and students and scholars in disability studies, political science, media studies, American studies, social movement theory, and legal history. Linda Hamilton Krieger is Professor of Law, University of California School of Law, Berkeley.

"Nothing about us without us" has been a core principle of American disability rights activists for more than half a century. It represents a response by people with disabilities to being treated with scorn and abuse or as objects of pity, and to having the most fundamental decisions relating to their lives -- where they would live; if and how they would be educated; if they would be allowed to marry or have families; indeed, if they would be permitted to live at all -- made by those who were, in the parlance of the movement, "temporarily able-bodied." In What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement, Fred Pelka takes that slogan at face value. He presents the voices of disability rights activists who, in the period from 1950 to 1990, transformed how society views people with disabilities, and recounts how the various streams of the movement came together to push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beginning with the stories of those who grew up with disabilities in the 1940s and '50s, the book traces how disability came to be seen as a political issue, and how people with disabilities -- often isolated, institutionalized, and marginalized -- forged a movement analogous to the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, and fought for full and equal participation in American society.

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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. ]]>

Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.