Disability studies and the law: In conversation with Professor (Dr) Nilika Mehrotra

I return to Patricia J. Williams’s essay “On Being the Object of Property” (1988) and her work more generally to explore how she imagines justice alchemically through the articulation of a rhetoricity of rights and of vulnerability. Put another way, I read Williams’s work as providing an early model for doing critical race and legal studies with critical disability studies. Although Williams does not use the term disability in her early work, I argue that her preoccupation with thinking vulnerability and rights together indicates an attempt to account for forms of disablement, including racism, in and across the spaces and performances of the law, academia, and medicine. I explore the condition of being rhetorically disabled in different institutional situations and show how certain practices—of relation, pedagogy, and care— can interfere with this condition, creating passageways between rights and needs, reason and unreason, and race and disability. I draw on both the content and formal and methodological innovation of Williams’s work on race and rights in order to explore the conjunctures and disjunctures—or what I call a structural and structuring double bind—between a rhetoricity of rights and a rhetoricity of vulnerability. I argue that the double bind as disorientation device helps us to generate transcultural analysis and create new forms of relation, pedagogy, and care.

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A Disability Studies Reading of the Law for Persons with Disabilities in India

Disability in South Asia: Knowledge & Experience ◽

10.4135/9789353280321.n22 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 382-400

Author(s):

Amita Dhanda

Keyword(s):

Disability Studies ◽

Persons With Disabilities ◽

The Law

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Disability, Law, and the Humanities

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.10 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 143-161

Author(s):

Rabia Belt ◽

Doron Dorfman

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Disability Studies ◽

Academic Discipline ◽

People Of Color ◽

Individuals With Disabilities ◽

Disability Law ◽

The Law ◽

Oriented Approach ◽

Identity Groups

Disability studies is a relatively new academic discipline that approaches disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon and has a firm foothold within the humanities. This chapter will offer a broad, interdisciplinary overview of the achievements and challenges of disability law in both the American and international contexts using a disability studies-humanities-oriented approach. The chapter emphasizes the notion of intersectionality and the ways disability correlates with other identity groups such as people of color, women, LGBTQI, and immigrants and their treatment under the law. The use of philosophical, historical, literary, and artistic perspectives will help demonstrate the “disability angle” to the legal story of rights and recognition for individuals with disabilities, as well as for other civil rights groups, while looking ahead and exposing remaining challenges.

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Ethical Challenges: Less About Moral Wrongdoing and More About Communication Breakdown

Perspectives on Gerontology ◽

10.1044/gero20.3.72 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 20 (3) ◽

pp. 72-84 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Paula Leslie ◽

Mary Casper

Keyword(s):

Ethical Challenges ◽

Speech Language Pathology ◽

Thickened Liquids ◽

Communication Breakdown ◽

Professional Duty ◽

Language Pathology ◽

The Law ◽

Personal Case

“My patient refuses thickened liquids, should I discharge them from my caseload?” A version of this question appears at least weekly on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Community pages. People talk of respecting the patient's right to be non-compliant with speech-language pathology recommendations. We challenge use of the word “respect” and calling a patient “non-compliant” in the same sentence: does use of the latter term preclude the former? In this article we will share our reflections on why we are interested in these so called “ethical challenges” from a personal case level to what our professional duty requires of us. Our proposal is that the problems that we encounter are less to do with ethical or moral puzzles and usually due to inadequate communication. We will outline resources that clinicians may use to support their work from what seems to be a straightforward case to those that are mired in complexity. And we will tackle fears and facts regarding litigation and the law.

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