Disability in court: intersectionality and rule of law

Abstract

Intersectionality is a commonly used perspective in issues regarding social inequality and injustice in several fields, and has also been introduced in disability studies. In legal systems, social inequality and rule of law are closely connected. The court is an arena that is known both to produce and reproduce social inequality. The purpose of this article is to raise and discuss the question of how intersectionality may serve as a productive theoretical approach in research on disability and rule of law. We discuss in what ways intersectionality as a perspective may contribute to rule of law for disabled people in Western legal systems. Our intention is to investigate the potential of intersectionality as a sensitizing perspective within a process-oriented model for analytical sensibility. Intersectionality as a perspective in relation to disability and rule of law is explored with categorization and gender in focus.

Keywords:

• Legal systems
• rule of law
• disability
• intersectionality
• gender

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank senior researcher PhD Karen-Sofie Pettersen at Work Research Institute, Oslo Akershus University College for valuable comments to the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Convention on the rights of people with disabilities: http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml