Although the social model is one way to define disability and a field of inquiry, it is not a disability policy. Deciding how to respond to "disability" in law and culture depends on a normative framework that cannot be supplied by the model. This framework might be analytical skills often become unhinged without a defensible normative goal. There is no way to set priorities, make unavoidable tradeoffs, or confront cost issues without a normative orientation; even legal formalists must admit this. Second, because of the gap between causation and policy, the stakes are lower for recognizing social forces in human disadvantage. Accepting a degree of social construction is not the end of a policy discussion and so it should be neither shocking nor frightening. It might be intellectually liberating. Third, the argument applies to all social construction observations, including those related to gender, race, sexual orientation, class, deviance, and law itself. For all of them, causation is separable from policy prescription. In fact the argument applies to all causation observations. None determine just outcomes. This is not to dismiss efforts to untangle causal forces in human affairs. The social model of disability, for its part, has been a source of revelation and inspiration for action. It can dispel uncritical assumptions that disadvantage is natural and necessary, which is no small feat. But we ought to know precisely what the model can and cannot accomplish.11 Then more can be done. We might achieve a sophisticated picture of the model's interaction with general normative frameworks, without relying on membership in the disability rights movement to do the work of argument.There is another oversight in the scholarship but this weakness underestimates the social model's implications. When the model is doing work within a normative framework, its insight can suggest a class of decisionmakers different from the class other perspectives suggest. This insight might require expertise in addition to or other than medical knowledge. In a way, disability rights advocates who constructed the social model were pointing toward this conclusion all along. Yet the connection between the model and institutional design, however mediated, has not been recognized in the law literature.Part I of this Article describes the social model of disability and some of its weaknesses. The model identifies a subset of all disadvantage related to physical or mental traits. Critics believe that this subset is small or that the model neglects 11 There is a connection here to the legal realists, who broke down the notion that prevailing forms of property and contract law were the natural order-but who were then willing to announce that the merits were open for debate. See below text accompanying notes 103-104. environment. For others, the causal picture is not so tilted. Moreover, those who use the label "social model" might embed implicit normative premises within the term, and they might believe a disabling environment is more easily or jus...

The congressional response to the Schiavo controversy was both extraordinary and feeble. It surely was exceptional in its speed and specificity. An Act for the Relief of the Parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo 1 was introduced and approved within a weekend -just days after the feeding tube was removed from Schiavo's body, and only a month after her husband obtained a state court order for that purpose. 2 The legislation, moreover, could not have been more targeted. The statute's content followed its title, granting certain litigation privileges to the parents and Schiavo alone.

What will happen after

No abstract