Welcoming Monsters: Disability as a Liminal Legal Concept

Abstract

This article was part of an issue in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities on philosophy and the law. It is divided into four parts. Part one surveys the field of the philosophy of disability, tracing it back to its activist origins and presenting some of the main tensions within it. Part two unpacks three themes found in writings in the wake of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida: the notion of the "monstrous," normalization, and the principle of "limitless welcome". Using primarily the work of Anita Silvers and of Margrit Shildrick, two influential philosophers of disability working respectively inside and outside 'of the liberal paradigm, I relate post-structuralist descriptive and normative claims to similarly subversive ideas existing within liberal political theory informing mainstream legal scholarship.