Disability Rights Resources

Disability Rights, Benefits, and Support Services Sourcebook provides an overview of rights and laws enacted to protect and accommodate people with disabilities.

This comprehensive volume assesses the relationship between legal rights and disability and the effect of law, legal process and third party professional intervention on the lives of people with disabilities.

The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 was hailed as revolutionary legislation, but in the ensuing years restrictive Supreme Court decisions have prompted accusations that the Court has betrayed the disability rights movement. In this timely book, Samuel R. Bagenstos examines the history of the movement and discusses the various, often-conflicting projects of diverse participants.

"Nothing about us without us" has been a core principle of American disability rights activists for more than half a century. 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.

In No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, Joe Shapiro of U.S. News & World Report tells of a political awakening few nondisabled Americans have even imagined. No Pity's chronicle of disabled people's struggle for inclusion, from the seventeenth-century deaf communities on Martha's Vineyard to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1992, is only part of the story. Joe Shapiro's brilliant political and human-interest reporting will change forever the way we see people with disabilities; all who read No Pity will recognize that disability rights is an issue whose time has come.

Signed into law in July 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became effective two years later, and court decisions about the law began to multiply in the middle of the decade. In The Disability Pendulum, Ruth Colker presents the first legislative history of the enactment of the ADA in Congress and analyzes the first decade of judicial decisions under the act. She assesses the success and failure of the first ten years of litigation under the ADA, focusing on its three major titles: employment, public entities, and public accommodations.