"Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?": The Complex Role of Narratives in Disability Cases

Abstract

When we think of the term disability, the word conjures up a multitude of im ages, some of them positive, some not. Even the positive ones may carry with them a sense of specialness that is inconsistent with our sense of equal or fair treatment. Moreover, the differences among disabilities?physical or mental disabilities, men tal retardation or mental illness, deafness or autism, congenital disabilities or those that develop later in life after an accident or trauma, alcoholism or quadriplegia, ob vious or non-obvious (or hidden) disabilities, epilepsy or learning disabilities, back problems or obesity, single or multiple disabilities?not only have presented very difficult problems of political coordination, but cut against the notion that there is a master narrative that can function in disability cases. In this essay, I want to discuss the role of disability narratives in litigation. This task is potentially a quite complex one, one to which it is hard to do justice within a short essay. So rather than attempt a comprehensive assessment of the role of narra tive in disability cases, let me start with some general observations about the nature of disability litigation narratives, the barriers to narrative coherence created by the opacity of courts, especially the Supreme Court, and, finally, the possibilities that narratives can present for expansion of rights of people with disabilities. If we start with what might be called the pre-litigation or non-litigation narratives of people with disabilities we might be able to list a number of them, some of which are negative, some of which are positive (at least as conventionally understood), and still others ostensibly positive or neutral but containing troubling seeds of negativity. If one focuses not on full-fledged narratives but on abstracts of narratives with a heavy emphasis on the person's character, a non-exhaustive list might include the following: