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Impairment, Discrimination, And The Legal Construction Of Disability In The European Union And The United States, Vlad F. Perju

Vlad Perju

This Article is a comparative study of disability regulations in the European Union and the United States over the past four decades. It explores how a conception of the relationship between illness, impairment and discrimination became a source of transformative insights that led to new regulatory regimes for persons with disability but also hampered the judicial enforcement of these regimes in both jurisdictions. The main transformative insight is the shift in understanding the cause of disability from the individual’s medical condition to the larger social environment. The obstacle is the radical nature of this shift, and specifically its effect of …