The Civil Rights Template and the Americans with Disabilities Act: A Socio-Legal Perspective on the Promise and Limits of Individual Rights

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the promises and limits of what we call "the civil rights template," a public policy model which addresses social injustices through lawsuits that punish discrete, culpable acts of discrimination, much as common law tort suits deter and punish irresponsible acts that cause injury. As critics have argued, the template is problematic because (1) organizational practices and routines are a far more powerful source of inequality than individual discriminatory acts, so that (2) lawsuits narrowly aimed at discrete acts of discrimination have limited ability to eradicate social inequalities. For us as sociolegal scholars, though, this is just the beginning of the matter. The big question left is the extent to which the civil rights template can be used as a political resource for institutional change. Under what conditions can individual lawsuits go beyond the particular facts of the case to reshape the practices of organizations? There is a large literature in sociolegal studies that addresses this question. In this chapter we illustrate some of the themes of that literature with some data from our research on organizational responses to the accessibility provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a law explicitly fashioned on the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Keywords: Civil rights, discrimination, disability, organizations