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Rights, Remembrance, and the Reconciliation of Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

David M. Engel  and
Frank W. Munger
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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Rights in American society present a paradox—critics increasingly assert that proliferation of rights is undermining Americans' sense of community, yet scholars continue to document Americans' reluctance to assert formal legal rights. We explore the meaning of rights in American society by describing the intersection between the evolving civil rights of a previously excluded minority, culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the personal histories of two individuals who might potentially invoke or benefit from such rights. Tracing the life stories of “Sara Lane” and “Jill Golding” from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and employment, we relate the everyday relevance or irrelevance of law to important elements of the reconstructed past—the development of self-concept and of one's place in relation to the social mainstream. The article, which is part of a larger project involving a more broadly based interview sample of adults with disabilities, analyzes life stories to critique familiar assumptions about the perceived conflict between rights and social relationships and about the mobilization of law. It also offers an innovative approach to the study of law and legal consciousness by involving Sara Lane and Jill Golding in the analysis of successive drafts and by including their reactions to what the authors have written.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 7 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Our thanks, first and most importantly, to the two individuals whose stories are discussed at length in this article, “Sara Lane” and “Jill Golding,” for generously sharing their thoughts and experiences with us and with those who may read this article. We are deeply grateful for their time, patience, and commitment to this project. Our thanks, too, to an outstanding group of students who have assisted us with this project since its inception: Dana Campbell, Shelley Chao, Sara Davis, Sara Faherty, Christine Farley, Johanna Oreskovic, Leslie Platt, Dana Schulman, and Denise Yates. We are grateful for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, received from friends and colleagues who attended our presentations at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law & Society Association in Toronto, at a Faculty Forum of the SUNY Buffalo School of Law in the summer of 1995, and at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law in Tokyo. We thank other readers as well, in particular Markus Dubber, Fred Konefsky, John Grima, Murray Levine, and Jane Winn. Finally, we thank the five anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review, whose comments were especially helpful. This study was supported by a grant from the Law and Social Sciences Program of the National Science Foundation (Grant SBR-9411919) and by the generous support of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy and the School of Law at SUNY Buffalo. An earlier related study of disability and employment was funded by the Fund for Research on Dispute Resolution.

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