Faculty Bibliography

There is vast and growing cause lawyering literature demonstrating how attorneys and their relationship to social justice movements matter greatly for law’s ability to engender progress. But to date, there has been no examination of the work of ADA disability cause lawyers as cause lawyers. Similarly, despite an extensive literature focused on the ADA’s revolutionary civil rights aspects and the manner in which the Supreme Court’s interpretation has stymied potential transformation of American society, no academic accounts of disability law have focused on the lawyers who bring these disability civil rights cases. This Article responds to these scholarly voids. We conducted in-depth interviews with many of the nation’s leading disability rights cause lawyers. What we found makes three novel contributions. As the first examination of the activities of these public interest lawyers and their advocacy, it brings to light a neglected sector of an otherwise well-examined field. In doing so, this Article complements but also complicates the cause lawyering literature by presenting a vibrant and successful cohort of social movement lawyers who in some ways emulate their peers, and in other ways have a unique perspective and mode of operation. The Article also forces a re-consideration of academic critiques of the efficacy and transformative potential of the ADA, because it demonstrates how disability cause lawyers have effectively utilized the statute to achieve social integration in the shadow of the Court’s restrictive jurisprudence.

Professors Stein, Waterstone, and Wilkins review Samuel Bagenstos’s Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement, suggesting that the disability rights movement’s success has been limited by a lack of “cause lawyering.” Many constituencies that have lobbied for civil rights, such as people of color, women, and lesbians and gays, have had significant internal divisions, and the disability rights movement is no exception, as Bagenstos documents. However, say the authors here, these other movements have benefited from lawyers dedicated to the shared goals of the group and attuned to effective, focused litigation. In contrast, the lawyers who have represented people with disabilities before the Supreme Court have had little affinity with the disability rights movement as a whole; instead, these lawyers have focused on the narrow needs of particular constituencies. Thus, the movement has chosen to advance its goals–granted, often with substantial success–through means other than the Supreme Court. However, the professors suggest, conditions have changed and the time may be ripe for the disability rights movement to reengage the Court.