The Vanishing Body of Disability Law: Power and the Making of the Impaired Subject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The influence of disability studies on legal scholarship is most visible in the social model, which claims that people are not disabled because of their bodily impairments, but by society in its refusal to accommodate their impairments.\nHowever, a modest but growing discourse within disability studies argues that the notion of impairment, in addition to disability, is socially constructed. This article aims to bring this problematized conception of impairment, informed by Michel Foucault’s conception of power, into contact with legal scholarship. Judith Mosoff’s sensibility about the role of impairments in the legal treatment of disabled people illustrates this critical outlook, which has the potential to guide scholarship and legal reforms. For instance, in the context of family law, those reforms could affect the evaluation of a person’s fitness to parent or her right to childcare support.\nThe first part of this article makes a prima facie case for a critical ontology of impairment and the second part provides theoretical foundations for such a practice. I use Supreme Court of Canada case law to illustrate how impairments are typically naturalized and to begin challenging impairment-based identities and detaching disability from impairment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.158 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".