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Discrimination

Disability Law

University of the District of Columbia School of Law

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The Missing Piece Of The Puzzle: The Intersection Of Race And Special Education, Tsega Zewdneh Shiferaw Jul 2022

The Missing Piece Of The Puzzle: The Intersection Of Race And Special Education, Tsega Zewdneh Shiferaw

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The privileges allotted to Americans cannot be compared to any other country’s citizens. Americans have the liberty of saying what they want, thinking what they want, and acting freely in public. Nebiyat Shiferaw (“Nebiyat”) is a thirty-year-old African American man who is unable to speak and live independently because he has autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (“ASD”). Nebiyat does not experience the same liberties as most Americans; he has gone through special education programs and has overcome discrimination, not because of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), but because of his parents advocating for him. As a …


Disability Rights Past, Present And Future: A Roadmap For Disability Rights, Marcy Karin, Lara Bollinger Mar 2020

Disability Rights Past, Present And Future: A Roadmap For Disability Rights, Marcy Karin, Lara Bollinger

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”)2 “was and is all about civil rights.”3 Enacted in 1990, its goal was to prohibit discrimination based on disability across society, from employment to places of public accommodation and government services. As the byproduct of bipartisan support and significant advocacy and leadership by members and allies of the disability community, there were high hopes that the ADA would live up to its goal. Unfortunately, that reality never came to pass for many individuals with disabilities. Instead, a line of Supreme Court decisions in 1999 and 2002 imposed increasingly narrow interpretations of the law’s core …


Restoring The Ada And Beyond: Disability In The 21st Century, Robert L. Burgdorf Jan 2008

Restoring The Ada And Beyond: Disability In The 21st Century, Robert L. Burgdorf

Journal Articles

Perhaps it was imprudent for me to agree, in response to the request of the symposium organizers, to address the future of disability law. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Neils Bohr supposedly once said that "[p]rediction is very difficult, especially about the future."' Columnist and author Jim Bishop wrote, "The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face." 2 Prognosticating is a very tricky and uncertain undertaking. I cannot pretend to have any particular gift for crystal ball gazing in disability matters. When I joined the …


The Americans With Disabilities Act: Analysis And Implications Of A Second-Generation Civil Rights Statute, Robert L. Burgdorf Jr. Jan 1991

The Americans With Disabilities Act: Analysis And Implications Of A Second-Generation Civil Rights Statute, Robert L. Burgdorf Jr.

Journal Articles

Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote that our nation's civil rights laws were a "sparse and insufficient collection of statutes ... barely a naked framework."' On their faces, many federal civil rights statutes constitute little more than broad directives that "Thou shalt not discriminate." Broadly worded statements outlawing discrimination were the optimal approach to statutory draftsmanship in light of the controversial nature of the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s. The drafters of these statutes needed to craft language that would be palatable to a majority of the members of Congress while still having a meaningful impact …