I recently attended and presented at a day-long symposium hosted by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) called “Disability Law: From tenBroek to the Twenty-first Century.” The title refers to NFB founder and scholar

Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, who wrote a seminal law review article in 1966

that laid the foundation for many of the advances in disability law and policy that have occurred in the last 42 years. Dr. tenBroek’s article, “The Right to Live in the World: The Disabled in the Law of Torts,” made the case that disabled people had a civil right to participate fully in the lives of our communities.

Many of the presenters noted that despite significant progress the last four decades, we are still fighting for the basic right to live in a world that is free of barriers and welcomes our full participation.

We still fight an institutional bias in the Medicaid program and force people to live in settings that they would not choose if they had an alternative. We continue to unveil new technologies like Apple’s iPhone without accounting for how to make them usable and accessible for people who can’t navigate the touchscreen interface. We spend millions on renovations for buildings and stadiums and fail to dramatically expand accessibility and sustainability of those structures for people with disabilities and an aging population. We apply parental testing technologies in a way that puts pressure on expectant mothers to terminate a pregnancy if the baby is likely to have a gene-linked disability.

As we approach the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have an opportunity to restate our commitment to tenBroek’s fundamental insight: that we as people with disabilities have a right to liberty, equal opportunity, and full participation going back to the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution. Our challenge is to identify and address the many remaining barriers to the full realization of that right in the United States, including a Supreme Court that has chosen to take a miserly approach to disability rights. The recently enacted U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which takes effect in May, creates an opportunity to build a more closely-connected global disability movement that can truly assert our collective right to live in the world.

It will be difficult for the U.S. to continue to be a global leader on disability issues unless we sign and ratify that historic treaty.

I encourage you to visit the NFB website at www.nfb.org to learn more about the pioneering work of Jacobus tenBroek. If you search his name on the NFB site you will find a great piece about his life and work by Lou Ann Blake, who was the lead organizer of NFB’s recent legal symposium. To learn more about the U.N. Convention, visit the AAPD website at www.aapd.com.

I came away from the symposium inspired to reclaim the mantle of our right to live in the world as equals, to expand our cultural understanding of what that means in 2008 and beyond, and to find ways to work with NFB and other disability organizations to realize Dr. tenBroek’s compelling vision. Working together, we will achieve that vision faster.