Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2021
Disabled advocates’ work has resulted in many domestic and international laws enshrining equal rights to access, opportunity, and inclusion, yet implementation lags far behind. Even where disability rights laws carry force, disabled people at the margins of the margins face appalling human rights violations, many deriving from social and legal structures designed to enact harm on marginalized, exploited, and targeted communities. Yet even laws meant to protect disabled people in theory often enable abuse and harm in reality, such as guardianship and involuntary commitment laws that may contravene the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Additionally, ableist oppression does not impact all disabled people equally, both across different disabilities, and among disabled people differentiated by race, gender, class, sexuality, language, or nation.
In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing U.S. and international legal frameworks governing rights, freedoms, and legal capacity for people with psychosocial disabilities, and then discuss applications of those laws and policies in current contexts. In both sections, we describe harms disabled people experience in the United States, ways in which legal structures enable or fail to prevent those harms, and potential avenues for legal and nonlegal advocacy. We highlight ways in which current law fails to adequately recognize people with psychosocial disabilities as full persons with autonomy and dignity.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.