The Legal Road to Rights? Disabling Premises, Obiter Dicta and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995

This article offers a critical exploration of the current limits of the law in establishing and maintaining the rights of disabled people. By offering a critical jurisprudence perspective and applying this to the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the article highlights the way in which pre-existing social dynamics underpin the manufacture and application of law. Despite the growth of social constructionist, realist, critical and post-modern views of laws, the continued power of natural and positivist views of laws as a supra-social code helps explain the current limits to anti-discrimination law. It is argued that, as a socially created phenomenon, law can be radically reconstructed. However, unless a fundamental reappraisal of law is undertaken, the Disability Discrimination Act and related legislation is likely to remain severely constrained.