Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

And as such, they could certainly become promising approaches in managing long termdisabilities created by prenatal alcohol exposure by inspiring integrated health services.Applied Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Myth or Reality?Carla Rodgers, University of Pennsylvania (carlarodgers@comcast.net)The concepts of therapeutic jurisprudence are well known. As elegantly stated by ProfessorDavid Wexler, “Therapeutic jurisprudence is the study of law as a therapeutic agent.” He alsostated that “Basically therapeutic jurisprudence is a perspective that regards the law as a socialforce that produces behaviors and consequences.” (1999-Thomas Cooley Law ReviewDisabilities Law Symposium) The questions addressed by this presentation are: Does it work inpractice? If so, where and how, and if not, can the application be improved? This author hasdirect experience with drug court diversion in the United States and familiarity with drug courtsin Australia and the United Kingdom. She will discuss the moderate success of such attempts.She will also discuss where attempts, such as diversion to anger management and otherbehavioral therapies have failed. Finally she will review the inherent tension between law andmedicine and psychology that have led to less than successful interventions. That tension beingthat law requires a specific outcome in a set point of time’ whereas medicine and psychologyfocus on the process and incremental improvements, which often take years and where timelimits cannot necessarily be applied.Pragmatic Realism as Therapeutic Jurisprudence in the International DisabilityRights ContextAnne Bloom, University of the Pacific (abloom@pacific.edu)Disability rights activists emphasize the social contingency of disability. Both the definition of“disability” and the experience of “disability” depend greatly upon the particular social contextin which people live and function. A similar argument can be made about “rights.” As manycritics have argued, rights in the abstract have no meaning and, as a result, it only makes sense tospeak of rights in terms of how they operate in particular social settings. How then can wedevelop meaningful principles for adjudicating disability rights claims in an internationalcontext? This presentation will argue for a jurisprudential approach that draws upon thepragmatic realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to defend a more grounded approach tointernational disability rights jurisprudence that focuses on paying closer attention to individualplaintiffs’ experiences and the surrounding material conditions. It will also argue that ajurisprudence based on pragmatic realism is a therapeutic jurisprudence because it allows spacefor litigants to articulate and consider the changing ways in which they understand andexperience disability in their own lives.449