In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Lennard J. Davis Bending Over Backwards Disability, Narcissism, and the Law I am not a lawyer. But when I was a child growing up in the Bronx, my Deaf mother highly recommended that I become one because I was so good at arguing for my position against my parents’ accusations. Instead, I became an English professor and now spend much of my time arguing for my interpretations against those of others. So perhaps things are not so different. I began this presentation with a brief story about myself. In the previous statement, I allowed a snippet of biographical detail that would permit readers to make certain judgments about me. As a result of those few words, those readers who are lawyers probably feel they can let me off the professional hook. Such readers are probably now settling back, putting their pens down, and expecting a literary jaunt, a kind of breezy, erudite entertainment rarely found in legal books or journals. In making such judgments, readers are relying on stereotypes about English professors arrived at by interpreting my tone and my style of writing, and they are indexing their expectations from previous life-events that were similar. In other words, such readers are interpreting me as they might any text or person , and my meager narrative has provided some grist for their mill. I too am interpreting texts—in this instance, some legal cases concerning people who have brought suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Before I do that, I need to justify the value of having an English professor read through some of these cases. It has been established by many in the relatively new endeavor of critical legal studies that cases are forms of narrative that can therefore be subject to the same kind of analyses that we tend to employ on novels or poetry.1 A second point involves the understanding that such cases are far from objective. Although cases are written in a style that suggests objectivity, impartiality, and authority, they are, after all, simply the written words of people. That style of writing, described by one scholar as comprising a “profoundly alien linguistic practice, . . . an archaic, obscure, profession98 alised and impenetrable language,” which judges use to decide cases,2 is simply a literary style like any other. Because words are part of language and language is a communal practice, there can be no use of language that transcends the sociability and biases of any linguistic community. It might therefore make sense for a literary critic to analyze the way legal language is used to create the illusion of objectivity, impartiality, and so on. In this sense, the role of the critic is an unmasking one, an attempt to show how many factors come into the writing of a case, just as many strands of culture come into the making of a novel or an opera. A third and related point is that, because cases are both analyzable and instantiations of a larger culture, they are therefore ideological by de‹nition. By ideological, I don’t mean that cases are polemical, but rather that they contain the predilections, politics, nuances, and biases of their authors’ particular culture or class within that culture. It is the job of a critic to tease out those predilections and nuances. Having justi‹ed, however sketchily, the claim that legal cases are narratives and in need of interpretation by literary critics, among others, I need to make another assertion. Cases involving disability, because they are often not so much about fact as they are about personal and social attitudes , tend to involve the states of mind of the various players in the story. We are asked, for example, to imagine the state of mind of a potential employer who faces an obese job applicant and tries to decide whether or not to hire her,3 or the state of mind of a supervisor who ‹res an employee who happens to have nonsymptomatic AIDS.4 When judges and juries rule on such cases, they have to perform a complex and creative act of identi‹cation. Since the Supreme Court advises us to consider trial participants not as “members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass” but as “uniquely individual human beings,”5 we then have an obligation to imagine and bring to life these individual states of mind through an act of what Martha Nussbaum calls “the literary imagination.”6 When we follow the narrative of the alleged crime, we must be readers, and...

Share