Abstract
People with disabilities, especially the impoverished among them, have long been the object of legal advocacy. Historically, lawyers acting on behalf of the disabled poor have fashioned litigation strategies to secure basic individual rights and to obtain much needed institutional reforms. Spanning both civil and criminal law contexts, these strategies reveal the ideological and discursive conjunctions linking disability and poverty. Nowhere are such conjunctions more striking than in the practice of Social Security law.
Juridical roles and relationships mediate the interpretation of disability. Mediation occurs in the contexts of administration, adjudication, and advocacy. Here, the roles of administrator, adjudicator, and advocate filter competing images of disability. Moreover, the relations dictated by these roles provide an added screen, obscuring the lived reality falsely designated “disability.” The mediation process aligns competing interpretations in hierarchical order, assembling dominant-subordinate groupings of ideals and discourses. Alignments that elevate ideals and discourses on necessitarian grounds are of limited virtue. Though adept at prosaic description and instrumental explanation, necessitarian analysis accommodates only the dominant juridical vision of a socio-legal artifact. This accommodation excludes opposing visions, negating alternative sets of ideals and discourses. The upshot of this exclusion is silence, in the instant case the silencing of impoverished people with disabilities.
In this Article, I analyze the ideals and discourses of both dominant and subordinate juridical visions of disability. To frame this analysis, I deploy a theoretical structure extracted from the work of Roberto Unger. In a prior writing, I turned to Unger to explicate the ideology of poverty lawyers. Unger's relevance to the subject of poverty law stems from his revision of social theory to meet the exigencies of societal-crisis. Poverty law is a field in crisis, its practice failing to alleviate either economic impoverishment or socio-legal powerlessness. The adjacent field of disability law is also in crisis, its overlapping practitioners expounding a vision of the disabled devoid of disabled people's own empowering ideals and discourses. For Unger, such silencing visions urge an investigation of ideological habits of interpretation.