Americans with Disabilities: Implications of the Law for Individuals and Institutions

Americans with Disabilities by Leslie Pickering Francis


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A collection of themed essays evaluating the ADA ten years out. Interdisciplinary and generally strong, with pieces on moral philosophy, law, sociology, and medicine. But ultimately I found it uneven and frustrating in that way a book written predominately by able-bodied academics is when I'm a disabled occasional political activist.

Some pieces were excellent – Ron Amanson's "Biological Normality and the ADA" deconstructs the categories of normal and abnormal function in ways analogous to previous deconstructions of race as a biological category. But then we have pieces like Lenard Davis's "Go to the Margins of the Class: Hate Crimes and the ADA," which is terrifying as it discusses the epidemic of sexual and physical violence against people with disabilities, and utterly jaw-droppingly enraging as it blithely proclaims an end to racial and gender discrimination in this country. I just . . . I don't even!

It is a good collection, and well organized. I found most helpful the sections on medicine – healthcare cost-rationing as a violation of the ADA, wrongful birth and wrongful life lawsuits ('if my doctor had told me x, I would have had an abortion,'), etc. I got bogged down in the opening sections, because I have a pretty low tolerance for political philosophy these days. I am beginning to have a knee-jerk near-allergic reaction to Rawls and theories of justice and historical counterfactuals. These days they make me want to shake people and explain what the word "empiricism" actually means, and tell them to get down from the ivory tower for a few days and go feed the fucking homeless or something. 'Hem, where was I?

Right, good book, a bit frustrating, a bit written about disprivilige from a place of privilege, you know the drill.

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