LAPA’s seminar format encourages attendees to familiarize themselves with the paper in advance. The commentator opens the session by summarizing the main themes in the paper and presenting some topics for discussion.

Copies of the seminar paper are typically available about 10 days before the event, during regular business hours, at the LAPA Offices on the 3rd floor of Wallace Hall.

This paper draws on original archival research and personal interviews to reconstruct a little-known episode in U.S. legal and political history: a four-year, government-funded campaign to train Americans with disabilities in the interpretation and enforcement of their newly guaranteed civil rights. In an era better known for rights retrenchment, trainees learned how to read and interpret federal regulations; how to spot violations of the law; how to win accommodations from entities that excluded them, and how to carry themselves as “rights-bearers.” The paper explores the legacies of these trainings, as well as their significance for broader understandings of the boundaries and content of American citizenship in the late twentieth century.

Karen M. Tani is a scholar of U.S. legal history, with broad interests in poverty law and policy, administrative agencies, rights language, federalism, and the modern American state. She teaches torts, legal and constitutional history, and social welfare law.

http://lapa.princeton.edu/content/training-citizen-enforcers-disability-rights-1978-1982

More information: Contact Judi Rivkin, jrivkin@princeton.edu