I will periodically use this Blog to share my thoughts, articles and books with you. My goal is to make it easy to find my work without worrying about firewalls or subscriptions. Please feel free to reach out to me through my work email address (Colker.2@osu.edu) if you have ideas of how I can better make use of this space.
30 % Discount Flyer for my new book, The Public Insult Playbook: How Abusers in Power Undermine Civil Rights Reform (California University Press 2021).
The above link is to my latest article. This is the abstract
This Article applies a disability justice framework to consider the issue of affirmative action under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The central argument is that originalists have misinterpreted the term “person” to avoid a group-based understanding of racial equality. Further, siloed understandings of equality—which treat race and disability as distinct—fail to recognize the interconnected web of racial and disability subordination. For example, constitutional claims for equal educational access in the 1970s arose from an understanding that government entities excluded many Black youth from K–12 education on the ground that they were uneducable because of their purported intellectual disabilities. Equality doctrine mistakenly insists that we consider these youth to be “Black” or “disabled” when understanding their constitutional rights. Abandoning the disability silo can help make broader claims for both racial and disability justice, including support for affirmative opportunities for all groups that have faced a history of subordination. It can also reveal the wildly nonoriginalist methodology underlying the Court’s purported reliance on originalism.
THE DISABILITY SILO
RUTH COLKER†
Abstract
This Article seeks to apply a disability justice framework to considering issues of affirmative action across many different statutes. The central argument is that a siloed understanding of affirmative action—one that treats race and disability as distinct—fails to recognize the deep interconnections among statutes that ban various kinds of discrimination. Abandoning the disability silo can help make broader claims for both racial and disability justice
This is my latest article criticizing the Roberts’ Court support of Christianity in society, even when endorsed by the state.