Disability Law

This book explores the historical and current experiences of people with disabilities in Canada, as well as the policy and advocacy responses to these experiences. Stienstra demonstrates that disability rights enable people with disabilities to make decisions about their lives and future, claim rights on their own behalf, and participate actively in all areas of Canadian society. This is a print book.

Law and Disability in Canada: Cases and Materials is an overview of law and disability issues in Canada. The authors discuss persons with disabilities and their interactions with the law as a holistic phenomenon that requires knowledge of and engagement with different areas of law. Through an examination of barriers regularly faced by people with disabilities, they present key and foundational domestic and international equality rights instruments (including the Charter, human rights law and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), the history of disability rights litigation and several contemporary access to justice issues. This is a print book.

This book explores the concept of "occupation" in disability well beyond traditional clinical formulations of disability: it considers disability not in terms of pathology or impairment, but as a range of unique social identities and experiences that are shaped by visible or invisible diagnoses/impairments, socio-cultural perceptions and environmental barriers and offers innovative ideas on how to apply theoretical training to real world contexts.

In Disabling Barriers, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to effect positive societal change This is an eBook.

Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. This book is available as an eBook and in print.

Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists to explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system.

In this book, twenty-four scholars from a variety of disciplines contend that achieving equality for the disabled is not fundamentally a question of medicine or health, nor is it an issue of sensitivity or compassion. Rather, it is a question of politics, and of power and powerlessness. This book argues that we need a new understanding of participatory citizenship that encompasses the disabled, new policies to respond to their needs, and a new vision of their entitlements. This book is available in print and as an eBook.

This book provides a comprehensive approach to the perspectives, lived experiences, and socio-cultural beliefs of Indigenous scholars regarding disabilities through a distinctions-based approach. Indigenous people demonstrate considerable knowledge in a multitude of capacities in spite of legal, monetary, social, economic, health, and political inequalities that they experience within from administrative authorities whether health, education, or governments.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the central concepts figuring in equality and non-discrimination standards across jurisdictions: formal and substantive equality, direct and indirect discrimination, reasonable accommodation, affirmative action and intersectional discrimination. It explains how different conceptualizations matter and may result in different outcomes in legislation, case law and policies. In doing so it draws on examples from a wide variety of sources, including the European, Inter-American and global human rights systems and the jurisprudence of the apex courts in Canada, India, South Africa and the US. This study also shows how the conceptualization of equality has been moving overall from formal to more substantive equality.

This is the personal memoir of blind lawyer and volunteer disability rights advocate David Lepofsky. It describes his involvement in and perspectives on the successful fight from 1980 to 1982 to get Canada’s proposed Charter of Rights amended to guarantee equal rights for people with disabilities. It includes a foreword by the Hon. Rosalie Abella, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. This memoir recounts the little-known saga of the disability amendment to the Charter. Few know that equality for people with disabilities was the only constitutional right added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the widely publicized 18-month battle over the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, from October 1980 to April 1982.