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LPE Originals

The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation

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The concept of reasonable accommodations at the heart of the ADA severely undercuts the efficacy of the law. Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities until an individual with a disability seeks (or begs) for access. This reactive, individualized model does little to prevent mass-produced inaccessibility.

LPE Originals

Moral Equality, Marxism, and Outraged Empathy

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In her earlier work, Marta Russell called readers attention to the economy as a factor producing disablement and argued that we needed to re-embed the market in society, to tame businesses’ need to profit via the social policies of an interventionist state. By the end of her career, however, Russell had gone further, focusing on capitalism itself. Her solution expressed not a Polanyian ideal of a somewhat more egalitarian capitalism, but a Marxist aspiration to a vastly better and more egalitarian society, achievable only by ending capitalism through collective action.
LPE Originals

The Public Reliance on Private Toilets

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When most people consider the crisis of American infrastructure, they imagine crumbling roads and bridges, decrepit schools and hospitals, or dysfunctional railways and power grids. This post calls attention to a different, often overlooked component of American infrastructure — public restrooms. Specifically, it argues for a constitutional right to public restroom access, grounded in state constitutional provisions dedicated to public health.
LPE Originals

Capitalism & Disability as Research Agenda

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The late Marta Russell is not a well-known figure among legal scholars and practitioners. She should be. Running throughout her writings is a powerful thesis: in many respects, law works to enable profit-seeking, and disability, as a concept, is crucial to that work.
LPE Originals

Capitalism & Disability: A Symposium on the Work of Marta Russell

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The modern disability rights movement has been primarily oriented around seeking labor inclusion through the expansion of civil rights statutes. Despite this, few disability theorists have approached the study of disability from an explicitly political economic perspective. Marta Russell, the author of several groundbreaking but lesser-known works on disability and capitalism, is one of the rare exceptions. This symposium celebrates her work and encourages the rediscovery of the political economy of disability.
LPE Originals

The Indian Country Abortion Safe Harbor Fallacy

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In response to the likely fall of Roe, commentators have suggested that tribal lands might serve as safe harbors for abortion in conservative states. While tribes ought to possess the territorial authority to regulate reproductive healthcare as they see fit, this proposal overlooks important legal, financial, political, and ethical considerations that make the prospect of such safe harbors unlikely.

A pinback button for the People's Church / Iglesia De La Gente. The background of the button is light blue. At center there is a yellow cross with white accent behind it. A black chain is on either side of the cross. Black text around the top reads [People's Church]. black text around the bottom reads [Iglesias De La Gente]. The back of the button has a metal pin with a clasp.
LPE Originals

The Young Lords: Building Power through Direct Action

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Creative and strategic militancies interrupt the normal functioning of society, shift the terms of debate in public discourse, and expand the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem.
LPE Originals

The Making of a Caregiving Crisis

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A system of employer-based health benefits created not only a fragmented health care financing structure but also an extremely powerful and consolidated industry that now resists changes to that structure.

LPE Originals

The Making of a New Working Class

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What happens when the factory is gone and the working class has been rendered dispersed and invisible? In this post, Gabriel Winant kicks off a symposium on his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.