Backlash against the ADA : reinterpreting disability rights / edited by Linda Hamilton Krieger.

"For civil rights lawyers who had toiled through the 1980s in the increasingly barren fields of race and sex discrimination law, the seemingly charmed passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act through the U.S. House and Senate and across a Republican president's desk in 1990 seemed almost fantastical. Not long after the act's effective date, however, members of the disability community began to voice fears of an unfolding assault on the ADA by federal judges, the media, and other national opinion makers. After the Supreme Court issued decisions sharply limiting the ADA's reach, followed by a decision the following summer invalidating an entire title of the act as it applied to the states, 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 past decade? In this book, a distinguished group of disability activists, disability rights lawyers, and scholars from political science, history, law, sociology, psychology, and English literature whose work centers on disability grapple with these questions. Taken together, these essays construct and illustrate a powerful new model of socio-legal change and retrenchment that can inform both scholarship and activism. This book 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." -- From back cover.