American’s with Disabilities Act: When Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, disability rights supporters hailed the law as a radical shift in our nation's policy toward people with disabilities. Ten years later, however, the statute's impact at least in the employment area seems anything but radical. ADA plaintiffs are among the least successful classes of litigants in the federal courts with a rate of (non)success that is second in futility only to that of prisoner plaintiffs. Although disability rights advocates have won some important victories in the Supreme Court, both that Court and the lower federal courts have issued a series of decisions that significantly restrict statutory coverage. And perhaps most important, the ADA appears to have had no significant positive effect on the rate of employment of people with disabilities. (Billiteri, Thomas J.)
Why this gap between radical expectations and disappointing results? Many disability rights advocates and academic defenders of the ADA have a ready explanation: Employers, courts, and the general public are engaged in a "backlash" against the ADA. Unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was enacted ten years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and after a series of highly salient events operated to change public consciousness about the civil rights of African Americans, the ADA was enacted before the disability rights movement had a full opportunity to educate the public about the important principles that underlay the new law. As a result, employers and other entities regulated by the ADA have resisted full compliance. And courts, untutored in the basic principles of the disability rights movement, have imposed their own retrograde views of the proper response to disability on a statute that decisively rejects those views. (Billiteri, Thomas J.)............
