front cover of Disabling Interpretations
Disabling Interpretations
The Americans With Disabilities Act In Federal Court
Susan Gluck Mezey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was intended to send a clear message to society that discrimination on the basis of disability is unacceptable. As with most civil rights laws, the courts were given primary responsibility for implementing disability rights policy.

Mezey argues that the act has not fulfilled its potential primarily because of the judiciary's "disabling interpretations" in adjudicating ADA claims. In the decade of litigation following the enactment of the ADA, judicial interpretation of the law has largely constricted the parameters of disability rights and excluded large numbers of claimants from the reach of the law. The Supreme Court has not interpreted the act broadly, as was intended by Congress, and this method of decision making was for the most part mirrored by the courts below. The high court's rulings to expand state sovereign immunity and insulate states from liability in damage suits has also caused claimants to become enmeshed in litigation and has encouraged defendants to challenge other laws affecting disability rights. Despite the law's strong civil rights rhetoric, disability rights remain an imperfectly realized goal.

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front cover of The Inclusive Corporation
The Inclusive Corporation
A Disability Handbook for Business Professionals
Griff Hogan
Ohio University Press, 2003
Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the enormous market of aging adults coping with impairments, disability has become an important issue for all businesses. The Inclusive Corporation is the first book to address comprehensively this issue of disability as it relates to all of the areas critical to effective business management.

The Inclusive Corporation succinctly presents disability-related information and resources that business managers need, and does so in a way that is highly readable and easy to use. The book is respectful and understanding of business requirements, while at the same time conveying a comprehensive knowledge of disability issues.

Matters of legal compliance, social responsibility, recruitment, diversity, employee supervision, customer service, product design and marketing — all are dealt with in The Inclusive Corporation. The result of the author's many years of experience working with businesses to improve their ability to include disabled people both as customers and employees, The Inclusive Corporation will be welcomed by people with disabilities and by business professionals nationwide.
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What We Have Done
An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement
Fred Pelka
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
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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