The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law (Hart Studies in Disability, Law, and Justice)

Equality law is audist. Deaf communities around the world continue to encounter Deaf Legal Exclusion through legal frameworks that define them narrowly and restrict their rights. The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law examines why these frameworks have not delivered equality in practice.It argues that the core issue is structural misrecognition: law protects deaf people only when they accept a definition based on disability.Sign language, culture and community are treated as secondary.Drawing on doctrinal and socio-legal analysis of the Equality Act 2010, case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the book critiques how equality law relies on narrow definitions of fairness.What appears to be inclusion is often a Deaf Legal Illusion: equality claimed in principle but absent in practice. Formal, substantive and transformative precepts of equality and the Deaf Equality Concepts are explored, assessing their a