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1		-==QI- Ableism 1AC ==
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3		-===1AC-Standard===
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5		-===Framing===
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8		-====Structural violence necessitates the exclusion of certain groups—this renders ethical theories meaningless====
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10		-====Winter and Leighton 99: Winter and Leighton ‘99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana sC. Leighton. Winter "Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century."====
11		-Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like sOpotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social jus- tice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace.
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13		-====That’s a pre-requisite to other ethical theories; even if they win that their ethical theory is the most coherent or sound, resisting structural oppression is a prior concern since it prevents individuals from participating in that moral space to begin with.====
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16		-====Ableism operates as foundational tactic of oppression that must be resisted====
17		-Siebers 09 University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism ¶ (Tobin, "The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification", Oct 28, Lecture, http://www.google.com/url?sa=tandrct=jandq=andesrc=sandsource=webandcd=1andved=0CCoQFjAAandurl=http3A2F2Fdisabilities.temple.edu2Fmedia2Fds2Flecture20091028siebersAesthetics'FULL.docandei=LWz4T6jyN8bHqAHLkY2LCQandusg=AFQjCNGdkDuSJkRXMHgbXqvuyyeDpldVcQandsig2=UCGDC4tHbeh2j7-Yce9lsA, accessed 7/7/12, sl)
18		-Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves "groups," and not "individuals," means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call "in-built" or "biological" inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. ¶ One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. "Racism" disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. "Sexism" disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. "Classism" disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. "Ableism" disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. ¶ As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful sexamples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.
19		-Thus, the Role of the ballot is to endorse the strategy for resisting ableist oppression
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21		-====Social constructions of disability are the root cause of other forms of oppression since the drive for normalization and the desire for aesthetic coherence forms the basis of our politics—thus, the Role of the judge is to facilitate disability scholarship. ====
22		-**Siebers** **10** ~~Tobin, Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Disability Aesthetics, pg. 58-63~~
23		-These two episodes may seem worlds apart, their resemblance superficial. The first turns on questions of aesthetic taste. The second is about political inclusion. But they express with equal power the current struggles in the United States about the ideal of a common culture. Do certain kinds of bodies have greater civil rights than others? Which is more important, the baby's body or the mother's body? Who should bear the cost to make public buildings accessible to people with disabilities? Who gets to have sex with whom? Whose bloodlines will Americans claim as their birthright? These are political questions for the simple reason that they determine who gains membership, and who does not, in the body politic, but the apparent oddity of the culture wars consists in the fact that the debates over these questions have used aesthetic rather than political arguments. The flash points in the battle are not on the senate floor or in the chambers of the powerful but in classrooms, museums, theaters, concert halls, and other places of culture. Opposing sides tend not to debate political problems directly, focusing instead on the value of reading certain books, the decency of photographs, paintings, and statues, the offensiveness of performances and gestures, the bounds of pornography, the limits of good taste. The culture wars are supposed to be more about who gets into the culture than who has culture, and yet it is difficult to raise one issue without raising the other. Aesthetics tracks the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies, but aesthetic feelings of pleasure and disgust are difficult to separate from political feelings of acceptance and rejection. The oppression of women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, blacks, and other ethnic groups often takes the form of an aesthetic judgment, though a warped one, about their bodies and the emotions elicited by them. Their actions are called sick, their appearance judged obscene or disgusting, their mind depraved, their influence likened to a cancer attacking the healthy body of society. Such metaphors not only bring the idea of the disabled body to mind but represent the rejected political body as disabled in some way. The culture wars appear to be as much about the mental competence to render judgment, the capacity to taste, and the physical ability to experience sensations as about a variety of controversial judgments, tastes, and feelings. They are as much about the shapes of the individual bodies accepted or rejected by the body politic as about the imagination of a common culture. The status of disability, then, is not just one controversy among others in the American culture wars. Disability is in one way or another the key concept by which the major controversies at the heart of the culture wars are presented to the public sphere, and through which the voting public will eventually render its decisions on matters both political and aesthetic. For to listen to opposing sides, the culture wars are about nothing more or less than the collective health of the United States. The culture wars not only represent minority groups as mentally and physically disabled-and demand their exclusion from the public sphere as a result-they reject works of art that present alternatives to the able body. Only by understanding that health is the underlying theme of the culture wars may we understand that thes,e two trends are related. The most scandalous artists in recent controversies about arts funding, for example, give their works an organic dimension that alludes to bodies gone awry, and these allusions are largely responsible for their shock value. They summon an aesthetic revulsion equivalent to the disgust felt by many persons in face-to-face encounters with people with disabilities, thereby challenging the ideal of a hygienic and homogeneous community.' Karen Finley's avant-garde performances confront the audience with a spectacle of errant body fluids: spermatozoaic alfalfa sprouts and excremental chocolate ooze over her body. In one performance, Lamb of God Hotel, she plays Aggie, a woman using a wheelchair having her diaper changed. Andres Serrano's notorious Piss Christ immerses a day-glow crucifix in a vat of the artist's urine, capturing the startling contradiction of Christianity's all-too-human son of God defiled by a mortal body and its waste fluids. Other photographs by Serrano present abstract expressionist patterns composed of blood and semen, stilllifes arranged with human and animal cadavers, and mug shots of the homeless, criminal, and aged. Robert Mapplethorpe's most memorable photographs capture the homoerotic body and serve it up to a largely heterosexual population. Perhaps his most outrageous work is a self-portrait revealing a bullwhip stuck up his rectum. It summons ideas of the devil as well as S/M practices, of course, but it also presents the image a man who has grown a tail, invoking a body whose deformed shape is less or more than human. These stunning works make a contribution to the history of art by assaulting aesthetic dictates that ally beauty to harmonious form, balance, hygiene, fluidity of expression, and genius. But their shock value owes less to their quibbling with certain aesthetic principles than to the bodies and organic materials presented by them. They represent flash points in the culture wars not only because they challenge how aesthetic culture should be defined but also because they attack the body images used to determine who has the right to live in society. People with disabilities elicit feelings of discomfort, confusion, and resentment because their bodies refuse cure, defy normalization, and threaten to contaminate the rest of society. We display bodies objectionable to the body politic, disrupting the longstanding association between instances of aesthetic form and what Fredric Jameson calls the political unconscious. The political unconscious, I want to argue, enforces a mutual identification between forms of appearance, whether organic, aesthetic, or architectural, and ideal images of the body politic. It accounts for the visceral and defensive response to any body found to disturb society's established image of itself. Jameson, of course, defines the political unconscious as a collective impulse that situates the experience of the human group as the absolute horizon of all interpretation. In fact, the existence of the group is for him so much a part of human experience that he considers the consciousness of individuality itself as a symptom of estrangement from collective life. Notice, however, that . To conceive social totality at the level of form envisions both objects of human production and bodies as symbols of wholeness. The political unconscious establishes the principle of totality as the methodological standard of all human interpretation. It installs the image of an unbroken community as the horizon of thought, requiring that ideas of incompetent, diseased, defective, or incomplete community be viewed as signs of alienation. This means that the very idea of disability signals the triumph of fallen or defective consciousness, despite the fact that there are no real, existing communities of human beings unaffected by the presence of injury, disease, defect, and incompleteness. In short, the political unconscious is a social imaginary designed to eradicate disability. The political unconscious upholds a delicious ideal of social perfection by insisting that any public body be flawless. It also displaces manifestations of disability from collective consciousness, we will see, through concealment, cosmetic action, motivated forgetting, and rituals of sympathy and pity. Advertisements, media images, buildings, and habitats work to assert the coherence and integrity of society, while public actions like telethons and media representations of heroic cripples mollify the influence of disability. Bodies that cannot be subsumed by ritual and other public action represent a blemish on the face of society, and they must be eliminated, apparently whatever the cost. Diane DeVries provides a familiar account, unfortunately, of the political unconscious at work, of the visceral disgust and accompanying violence often directed at people with disabilities. She reveals that observers of the disabled body often feel compelled to fly into action, to cure or kill the ungainly sight before their eyes. De Vries was born with short arms, no hands, and no legs: once when I was a kid, I was in a wagon and we were in this trailer park, and some kid came up to me with a knife. He said, "Aw, you ain't got no arms, you ain't got no legs, and now you're not gonna have no head." He held me right there, by the neck, and had a little knife. It was one of those bratty kids that do weird things. (Cited by Fine and Asch 48)
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26		-===Offense===
27		-Plan Text: The United States federal government should overturn the decision made in San Francisco v Sheehan and rule that police officers found to have violated the Americans with Disabilities act (or ADA) should be denied qualified immunity.
28		-Contention 1- Accountability
29		-The court’s decision in San Fransico v. Sheehan ruled that officer’s actions need not comply with the ADA to be granted qualified immunity
30		-SCOTUS 15: SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. Syllabus CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, ET AL. v. SHEEHAN CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT. No. 13–1412. Argued March 23, 2015—Decided May 18, 2015 201. RW
31		-Respondent Sheehan lived in a group home for individuals with mental illness. After Sheehan began acting erratically and threatened to kill her social worker, the City and County of San Francisco (San Fran- cisco) dispatched police officers Reynolds and Holder to help escort Sheehan to a facility for temporary evaluation and treatment. When the officers first entered Sheehan’s room, she grabbed a knife and threatened to kill them. They retreated and closed the door. Concerned about what Sheehan might do behind the closed door, and without considering if they could accommodate her disability, the officers reentered her room. Sheehan, knife in hand, again confronted them. After pepper spray proved ineffective, the officers shot Sheehan multiple times. Sheehan later sued petitioner San Francisco for, among other things, violating Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) by arresting her without accommodating her disability. See 42 U. S. C. §12132. She also sued petitioners Reynolds and Holder in their personal capacities under 42 U. dS. C. §1983, claiming that they violated her Fourth Amendment rights. The District Court granted summary judgment because it concluded that officers making an arrest are not required to determine whether their actions would comply with the Americans with Disabilites Act before protecting them- selves and others, and also that Reynolds and Holder did not violate the Constitution. Vacating in part, the Ninth Circuit held that the ADA applied and that a jury must decide whether San Francisco should have accommodated Sheehan. The court also held that Reynolds and Holder are not entitled to qualified immunity because it is clearly established that, absent an objective need for immediate entry, officers cannot forcibly enter the home of an armed, mentally ill person who has been acting irrationally and has threatened anyone who enters.
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33		-That makes legal recourse for disabled people impossible, weakens ADA protections and justifies police atrocities—training doesn’t solve
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35		-Çevik 15: Mrs. Kerima Çevik is curently a blogger for disabilty rights, autistic inclusion, accommodation, communication rights, and representation. A parent activist, editor and contributing writer who consults on Autism and Ethnicity, she blogs on topics of critical race, intersectionality, autism and social justice. An independent researcher, she focuses on shining a light on disparities in qualify of life for marginalized intersected disabled populations and their families through grassroots community building activities and pay it forward activism models. She is a married mother of two children, and world traveler currently homeschooling her adventurous son Mustafa, who is intensely Autistic and nonspeaking.. Standing at the intersectino of adolescence, race, and disability. The Autism Wars. June 9, 2015. http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2015/06/standing-at-intersection-of-adolescence.html. RW
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37		-When I realized that roughly 70 of people with disabilities encountered law enforcement more than once in their lifetimes, learned how many were victims of abuse and crime, and how many disabled males of color died in such encounters, I went to Annapolis to ask for an autism training bill for first responders. I later came to the realization that the training concept is inherently flawed and limited in its success. For police officers, in particular, Particularly for autistic and other neurodivergent males of color, police training in other states did not deter or reduce catastrophic encounters. Understand that Freddie Gray was diagnosed with disabilities resulting from lifetime exposure to lead paint poisoning common to the low-income housing in West Baltimore. Freddie Gray was neurodivergent. His death is not counted as a Black disabled catastrophic encounter death but it should be. I have recently realized I must accept the idea that just about the only way to ensure our nonspeaking autistic son isn't harmed is instilling in him that he must avoid the police as much as possible. The only legislative goal that will reduce catastrophic encounters with law enforcement for neurodivergent males in general and neurodivergent Black and brown males, in particular, is legislation aimed at not placing them in the path of police, to begin with. I never thought I would have to consider how to teach my son to avoid police. But there is no denying that recent events demonstrate race relations in this area of modern society have reversed 50 years, and we are now living in a dangerously polarized country. So here we are with our sweet son, standing at the intersection of racism, ableism, and disability. We are looking for breadcrumbs we can leave to aid him in preserving his own life and the thought is frightening. So frightening that I can say the only thing that frightens me more is the rising number of autistic school children being arrested for school infractions and forced into the criminal justice system . How do we teach him that the safest way to deal with law enforcement is to avoid engaging them at all? Even if he needs help. Even if they seem kind and appear to understand he is unable to speak. Despite what he's been presented by well-meaning people who don't know what it means to be a Black man in America. Because if he meets a good cop one day, he may meet the one that hates him the next, and that could end his life. Too many others have died because they could not speak and were not provided with the means to respond when police ordered them to do so. One of my main goals for the remainder of my life is lowering the odds that my only son will die by pushing our community to rethink what the role of law enforcement should be in our lives and to support efforts to remove law enforcement from inappropriate roles in the lives of autism families so we are able to avoid police engagement as much as humanly possible. I am tired of watching our people die. We are traumatized and tired of being helpless witnesses to the lives destroyed and lost in such encounters. Freddie Gray, Matthew Ajibade, Tario Anderson, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones. It is the list of the dead and injured that just keeps getting longer by the month while the criminal justice system keeps failing them and our entire race, first by allowing them to come to harm, second by allowing those who harmed them to not be made responsible for their actions, and third, by blaming the victims in order to absolve the perpetrators. I continue to repeat that even someone who is suspected of committing a crime has the right to be safely arrested and tried by a jury of his peers. Police are never supposed to be executioners. Knowing police officers who sully the uniform will not be held accountable for any wrongdoing, regardless of how much evidence of their guilt is apparent is soul destroying. We've been swallowing this bitter bill for my entire life. It is a spiritual struggle to continue to defiantly declare one's right to exist and human right to humane treatment knowing this is true. Here is one of many examples of justice denied. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo mounted a car that 5 other police officers had riddled with bullets after "confusing the car backfiring with a gunshot" and continued shooting down into the windshield of said car until the two already wounded victims, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, where dead. Officer Brelo was acquitted of any wrongdoing. 137 bullets were not, in a judge's opinion, excessive use of force. If you believe that compliance of a traffic stop would have changed the conclusion of this encounter, then you are deceiving yourselves. If the moment the car backfired, the knee-jerk reaction was to shoot with impunity, this act was driven by the presumption that Black suspects are dangerous criminals who should be shot. That is racial profiling. Which makes this a hate crime. This was never going to be an arrest. It was an execution. Understand why we fear for our son. If you don't understand and don't act to help everyone fighting to change this deadly sequence of events, more will die. This week the Supreme Court ruled in favor of San Francisco in the case of City and County of San Francisco v. Sheehan, overturning the decisions of all lower courts and placing all disabled people at risk. Specifically, they ruled that police who forcibly enter the premises and shoot a mental health patient have qualified immunity from litigation. This sets a legal precedent that weakens ADA protections despite the court's attempt to bypass the impact on ADA issue and enables further cases of excessive use of force when dealing with neurodivergent people in general and mental health consumers in particular. I have already pointed out that both Paul Childs and Stephon Watts were shot dead by police officers who had autism training, knew them, and had even helped them in the past. A police officer being familiar with your son's autism, knowing your son doesn't use verbal speech, being trained to approach and manage neurodivergent people doesn't protect them from being shot by those very police officers later on. If I seem pessimistic about what is happening it is because even in cases where video evidence of wrongdoing supports witness accounts, and even in cases where convictions are handed down, inevitably, as in the Supreme Court decision in San Francisco v Sheehan, justice eludes the victim. The conviction of the New Orleans police officers who shot among others 40-year-old autistic Ronald Madison and his brother Lonnie, who was trying to walk him over the bridge and out of New Orleans after Katrina, was overturned and they have now been granted a new trial. We all know these men will never see prison. Ronald Madison was a gentle person, loved by his family and neighbors. His brother refused to leave New Orleans without him and remained behind to help lead Ronald out after the storm because he didn't understand why he had to leave his home. It seems now that no one will ever answer for the innocent lives taken that day either.
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39		-Qualified immunity as a defense legitimizes ableist stigmas and enables police killings—that’s a state-sanctioned form of structural violence that normalize genocidal practices—accountability is at the heart of this problem
40		-Mack 16: Tracy Mack. January 6, 2016. International Socialists. Legitmizing police violence: Sanism, ableism, and racism. http://www.socialist.ca/node/2978. RW
41		-Even when damning evidence exists against Toronto police officers, they have not been held accountable for their rights-depriving, violent and lethal actions toward racialized people with disabilities, and in particular, racialized Mad people. The videotape recording in Otto Vass’ case (killed in the year 2000), revealed that officers threw the unarmed Hungarian immigrant to the ground, then one officer held him down while three others beat him to death. The four officers were charged with manslaughter, but claimed their use of force to subdue him was justified based on their convincing appeal to the stereotype of Mad people as violent. Despite viewing the officers mercilessly beating Vass, the jury found all four officers not guilty of manslaughter. In Christopher-Reid’s case, a 26-year-old Black man who was experiencing mental distress in 2004, the officers were also cleared of any wrongdoing despite the evidence against them. Officers accounts were inconsistent with the forensic evidence, which revealed that Christopher-Reid, who had not committed any crime, was running away from the officers when he was shot; not lunging towards the officers as they claimed. Instead of officers provoking a fearful response by shouting commands with their guns drawn, de-escalation techniques and non-lethal force tactics could have alerted and informed the officers that Christopher-Reid was experiencing mental distress and signaled that this was not a criminal justice issue. The role of race in the killing of Christopher-Reid was addressed briefly at his inquest but was dismissed as a contributing factor to his death. In Byron Debassige’s case, a 28-year-old homeless First Nations man, a contributing factor in his death was not dismissed during the inquest; a complete omission occurred instead. On the evening of February 16, 2008, Debassige stole a couple of lemons from a convenience store. Officers responded to the call with their guns drawn and shouting commands. Debassige refused to drop his 3-inch blade and police fatally shot him four times. The SIU report did not include the non-police witness statements that were inconsistent with those of the police, while also lacking crucial contextual information, such as Debassige’s psychiatric history. The omission of these crucial pieces of information justified the excessive force used by the officers who were cleared of any wrongdoing. Normalizing violence In the name of "security," police violence is normalized. This violence—especially when the victim is racialized, socially disadvantaged, disabled and/or Mad—is perceived as legitimate, necessary, and justified from the perspective of the state, rather than being viewed as excessive. In all the cases mentioned above, a decontextualized narrative emerges whereby officers state they had no other option but to kill the victim. Police excuses—they were protecting the public, they thought they saw a weapon, they were threatened by the 3-inch blade or were feeling threatened by an unarmed person—have negated accountability and due process and legitimatized police violence. This legitimacy is ingrained into the foundation of our social structure, evident by jury members repeatedly and consistently deeming officers not guilty, even after they have been confronted with evidence that clearly demonstrates the inconsistencies within the officer’s statements. These police killings are not an error or an unfortunate outcome; they are an element of police power, a legitimized practice of the state and of the social order that authorizes it.
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45		-Plan solves—Overturning San Fransisco v. Sheehan is key to stop ableist police violence by holding police accountable for their actions—it also enables more effective policing
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47		-Perry 15: David M. Perry. Aljazeera America. A chance to reduce police killings of the disabled. March 23, 2015. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/a-chance-to-reduce-police-killings-of-the-disabled.html. RW
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49		-Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities are regularly dying at the hands of police officers across the country. In just the last few weeks, four such deaths have made national news: Kristiana Coignard in Texas, Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Washington, Lavall Hall in Florida and Charley Robinet in California. According to the American Psychological Association, some officers spend more time "responding to calls involving mental illnesses than they do investigating burglaries or felony assaults." Too often, these encounters turn violent. Our best guess is that about 50 percent of killings by police involve psychiatric disability of some sort. On March 23, the Supreme Court will have a chance to address this national crisis. The case of Sheehan v. San Francisco offers the justices the chance to clarify how the ADA applies to law enforcement — an important step that could strengthen the broader movement for police reform. This case will determine to what extent police can be held accountable to the best practices of their profession. The case In August 2008, Teresa Sheehan, a resident of a group home for people with psychiatric disabilities, threatened a social worker with a kitchen knife. The social worker called the police. Two officers arrived and entered Sheehan’s room but retreated when she threatened them as well. They called for backup. Instead of waiting, they re-entered the room. Sheehan came at them with the knife, and they shot her repeatedly. Luckily, she survived. A hung jury resulted in a partial acquittal of assault charges against her. The lawsuit focuses on the legality of the second entry into Sheehan’s room. She sued the officers under Title II of the ADA, arguing that by not waiting for backup, the officers did not reasonably accommodate her disability. Furthermore, her attorneys argue that
50		-Threat of litigation specifically in ADA cases incentivizes better policing and catalyzes reform necessary for inclusion
51		-Auner 16: Thomas J. Auner. "For the Protection of Society's Most Vulnerable, the ADA Should Apply to Arrests." Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 49.1 (2016). RW
52		-When courts deem the ADA applicable to specific situations, public and private entities typically respond by making the necessary changes to comply with the law. For example, in 1986, prior to the passage of the ADA, 51 percent of employers made efforts to reasonably accommodate employees with disabilities. In 1995, after Congress enacted the ADA, this figure rose to 81 percent. Yet, some entities have resisted complying with the ADA until they are sued. For example, disabled transportation users sued the paratransit program in Los Angeles County for failing to reasonably accommodate riders by frequently arriving late. The litigation provided the paratransit system with the necessary incentive to change, which resulted in substantial improvements. Similarly, police departments located within jurisdictions that apply the ADA to arrest situations will be forced to substantially improve training, or face potential liability under the ADA. Programs that train police officers to respond appropriately to mentally ill persons allow police departments to comply with the ADA, but more importantly, will tangibly improve the safety of the mentally ill.
53		-ADA lawsuits are a crucial check on state power—reforming qualified immunity is a good first step to transform the criminal justice landscape to better suit the needs of disabled people
54		-Perry 2: David M. Perry. Aljazeera America. A chance to reduce police killings of the disabled. March 23, 2015. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/a-chance-to-reduce-police-killings-of-the-disabled.html. RW
55		-
56		-tthe violation of the ADA ~~should~~ exempts the officers from qualified immunity, a doctrine intended to protect police from lawsuits unless it’s clearly established that the officers violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. At issue is not whether the police were wrong to enter the room the second time but whether it’s allowable for Sheehan’s lawyers to argue that they were wrong before a civil jury. A federal judge initially dismissed Sheehan’s claim, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision, allowing the civil lawsuit to go forward. Now the Supreme Court will hear the case. The arguments Deputy City Attorney Christine Van Aken argues that the case is very narrow. She agrees that law enforcement must consider the ADA but that there’s a direct threat exemption that makes the officers’ second entry to the room lawful. Police had to enter because Sheehan could have had weapons or hostages or could have escaped via a window or fire escape. None of these things were true, but one legal position is that if an officer might reasonably have been concerned about these possibilities, Sheehan would have no claim.his chain of hypothetical possibilities, though, is not the only way of looking at this case. Here’s something we know for sure: The officers were fully aware that Sheehan had psychiatric disabilities, was in crisis and needed help. Their decision to charge back in without support made the ensuing violence inevitable. Furthermore, Ben Nisenbaum, an attorney for Sheehan, denies that she posed any kind of threat after the officers left the room the first time. He raises questions about the decision-making process that led the officers to re-enter the room. Why didn’t they wait for that backup? Shouldn’t the officers have tried to access some of the city’s mental health crisis resources? Shouldn’t the officers have followed the city’s policy on barricaded suspects and waited Sheehan out? These are questions Nisenbaum wants to take to a jury. Susan Mizner, a disability counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed an amicus brief in the case, worries about the precedent that a decision against Sheehan could set. As it is, she said, the deck is so stacked for police that most lawyers won’t even take this kind of case.
57		-That’s a problem, because civil lawsuits offer a crucial check on the power of the state. She points out that the court isn’t deciding whether Sheehan should win her lawsuit but whether she gets to sue at all. A precedent denying her that right would further swing the balance of power. Seth Stoughton, an expert on policing and the law at the University of South Carolina, raises another question. Circuit courts differ on what time frame to consider in qualified immunity cases. Should courts consider the tactics that lead up to a violent incident or just the moment when the trigger is pulled? If the Supreme Court takes the broad view, Sheehan will likely get her day in court, and police departments will have an incentive to emphasize de-escalation and tactical restraint. Conversely, a ruling for the city might make it impossible to promote tactical restraint through the Fourth Amendment.The Supreme Court has the unique power to take a case like this and use it however they see fit. The justices could wholly exempt arrest from ADA Title II protections, or they could reinforce the power of the Fourth Amendment and change the face of modern policing. They are likely to do something more modest, though even a more restrained ruling against Sheehan could gut key protections of this landmark piece of legislation and undermine the movement against police violence. Meanwhile, people like Teresa Sheehan keep being shot, and far too many are dying. We know how to reduce the rate of such killings, but we need legal reform to convince law enforcement of that on a national level.
58		-Qualified immunity blocks larger social movements by fragmenting systemic problems into individual cases—the aff is key
59		-Hassel 99** ~~Hassel, Diana. "Living a Lie: The cost of Qualified Immunity" Winter 1999. Volume 64. Missouri law Review. Available at: http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol64/iss1/9 ~~ NB**
60		-The problem with qualified immunity is not so much that the outcomes are sometimes unfair but the fact that qualified immunity blocks a clear view of the real limitations that exist in civil rights law. Civil rights law is, in effect, being designed in the dark. Distinctions are being made about the types of cases that will receive compensation and the types that will not. These distinctions are not articulated as such; instead, the results are understood to be the result of the qualified immunity defense. As we have seen, for example, a procedural complaint in the context ofan employment dispute is more likely to survive the qualified immunity defense than is a complaint about whether a police officer used excessive force in the arrest of a dangerous suspect. Rather than organizing civil rights law in these categorical ways, however, qualified immunity makes the civil rights remedial system appear to be about individual cases and the reasonableness of individual defendants. Current qualified immunity doctrine serves as a means to diffuse conflict. Without a clear rule that some kinds of civil rights harms will not be redressed, there is minimal pressure for change. This "hiding of the ball" quality of qualified immunity is why, in spite of many expressions of dissatisfaction with the system,there had been little effective rallying for change. There as on the discontent of the participants in this system has not led to a significant change is that the terms of the debate are defined by the immunity system rather than by the fundamental question of the extent of rights and liabilities in civil rights actions. The civil rights remedial scheme organized around qualified immunity thus has an inherently self-preserving or stabilizing quality. It allows for tinkering at the margins, but fundamental recasting of the terms of the debate is unlikely. My assertion that qualified immunity has a camouflaging effect on civil rights law is supported by a large body of scholarship that explores legal regimes that define reality in a way that limits the ability of the participants in the system to change it.'27 These scholars argue that when a legal system is accepted as being the only available way to organize an activity and thus seems inevitable, the legal system encourages acceptance of the status quo. 2 8 The insights gained by scholars working in this area are helpful to apply to the qualified immunity standard in order to explore its hold on the civil rights imagination. This analysis maps out the way a doctrine such as qualified immunity can develop into an obstacle to the very aims it professes to accomplish. Particularly apposite to an analysis of civil rights law is the work that has been done on the change-inhibiting impact of the development of antidiscrimination law.129 In commenting onthe effect ofthe adoption ofequal rights rhetoric on the struggle to end racial inequality, Kimberle Crenshaw has concluded that "~~s~~ociety's adoption of the ambivalent rhetoric of equal opportunity law ha~~s~~ made it that much more difficult for Black people to name their reality. While equal employment opportunity law has been adopted, the material reality of most Black people has not improved."'30 In fact, improvement may be hindered by the existence of the equal opportunity law since it may undermine the political consensus necessary for change.' 3' Another commentator has suggested that "the language of rights undermines efforts to change things by absorbing real demands, experiences, and concerns into a vacuous and indeterminate discourse. The discourse abstracts real experience and clouds the ability ofthose who invoke rights rhetoric to think concretely about real confrontations and real circumstances.' 32 The existence of antidiscrimination law can thus create the appearance of improvements in racial equality while at the same time not encouraging fundamental change. 33 The focus on the intent of the actor in equal protection claims rather than the impact on the person experiencing the discrimination has also been criticized as an inhibitor to the elimination of racial inequality.3 By paying exclusive attention to the blameworthiness of the defendant, an examination of the impact of the challenged practice on those complaining about it is lost. Fairness to the defendant, rather than eliminating discriminatory effect, is the central concern. These commentators suggest that the economic and social reality of race inequality is obscured by the existence of antidiscrimination law and by the success of a small exceptional group. As Derrick Bell has stated, "Discrimination claims when they are dramatic enough and do not threaten majority concerns, are given a sympathetic hearing, but there is a pervasive sense that definite limits have been set on the weight that minority claims receive when balanced against majority interests."'35 While it is unclear what the alternative to antidiscrimination law is, these critiques strongly argue that antidiscrimination law does not do what it suggests it will do and may, in fact, make a better system more difficult to imagine and thus to create. This current critique of antidiscrmination law can be used to understand how the qualified immunity standard affects the system of compensation for constitutional wrongs. One major similarity is the way in which the existence of Section 1983 siphons off pressure to create some other system of redress. The open-ended language of the Section 1983 statute seems to promise a powerful remedy against governmental abuse. As we have seen, qualified immunity severely limits that remedy, but on a case-by-case basis. There is no general prohibition against certain types of civil rights claims, only the seemingly individualized application of the qualified immunity defense. The fact that some types of claims are destined to fail because of the type of claim they are, not because ofthe particularized behavior ofthe defendant, is hidden. Adding to the illusion of a generally available remedy is the spectacular success of a few high profile cases. A few large recoveries in cases that present particularly compelling facts obscure the reality of the fruitlessness of most 36 claims.
61		- On the other side of the lawsuit, qualified immunity promises much more to the defendant than it delivers. The defense is supposed to protect government actors not only from liability but also from entanglement with litigation. The promise is often not kept because the qualified immunity defense presents a combination of fact and law questions that cannot be quickly disposed of prior to trial. However, the theoretical protection offered by the defense and the low incidence of actual judgments against government actors lulls government employees into acquiescence to the system. The emphasis that qualified immunity places on the reasonableness of the defendant's actions rather than on whether a constitutional right was violated is another way in which qualified immunity distorts civil rights law. Qualified immunity makes the essential issue of a civil rights claim the question of whether it would be too much of an inhibitor of government action to require a particular defendant to pay damages to the plaintiff. The focus is not, at least initially, on whether the plaintiffs constitutional rights were violated. This emphasis also makes it difficult to discern and consider which rights are or should be protected and which we are content not to protect with monetary compensation. Qualified immunity's harm is that it makes it difficult to see the policy choices made by courts in civil rights actions. Cloaking these policy choices in the qualified immunity doctrine avoids the possibility of an open debate concerning which civil rights should be protected and how. Given its obvious flaws, the continuation of qualified immunity as the key legal issue in civil rights cases can only be explained by the hidden purpose it serves; it avoids the divisive and perhaps unresolvable conflicts among participants in civil rights litigation. Qualified immunity accomplishes this conflict-avoiding function by giving judges wide latitude in making determinations about its application and by couching the outcomes of civil rights litigation in terms that make the substantive results difficult to perceive. These qualities account for the faithful adherence to a doctrine that is regarded as so unsatisfactory to so many. The problem with this conflict avoidance mechanism is that it allows unarticulated decisions to be made about the extent of liability for civil rights violations. Civil rights litigation does have limitations to it; every case is not given an opportunity to succeed. These determinations are being made; they are just not described as such. Using qualified immunity as a shield from the truth may buy us peace, but it keeps from us the tools required for reform.
62		-Contention 2- Competence
63		-Qualified immunity cases are decided based on a standard of "reasonable competence"—letting good officers off the hook and punishing the incompetent ones
64		-Blum 13: Karen M. Blum. Suffolk University Law School. February 1, 2013. Qualified immunity: Update on absolute immunity. http://www.njd.uscourts.gov/sites/njd/files/Section1983QualifiedImmunity.pdf. RW
65		-Messerschmidt v. Millender, 132 S. Ct. 1235, 1244-51 (2012) ("The validity of the warrant is not before us. The question instead is whether Messerschmidt and Lawrence are entitled to immunity from damages, even assuming that the warrant should not have been issued. . . . Under these circumstances—set forth in the warrant—it would not have been unreasonable for an officer to conclude that there was a ‘fair probability’ that the sawed-off shotgun was not the only firearm Bowen owned. . . And it certainly would have been reasonable for an officer to assume that Bowen’s sawed-off shotgun was illegal. . . Evidence of one crime is not always evidence of several, but given Bowen’s possession of one illegal gun, his gang membership, his willingness to use the gun to kill someone, and his concern about the police, a reasonable officer could conclude that there would be additional illegal guns among others that Bowen owned. ~~footnote omitted~~ . . . .Given the foregoing, it would not have been ‘entirely unreasonable’ for an officer to believe, in the particular circumstances of this case, that there was probable cause to search for all firearms and firearm-related materials. . . . It would . . . not have been unreasonable—based on the facts set out in the affidavit—for an officer to believe that evidence regarding Bowen’s gang affiliation would prove helpful in prosecuting him for the attack on Kelly. . . . Not only would such evidence help to establish motive, either apart from or in addition to any domestic dispute, it would also support the bringing of additional, related charges against Bowen for the assault. . . . Moreover, even if this were merely a domestic dispute, a reasonable officer could still conclude that gang paraphernalia found at the Millenders’ residence would aid in the prosecution of Bowen by, for example, demonstrating Bowen’s connection to other evidence found there. . . . Whatever the use to which evidence of Bowen’s gang involvement might ultimately have been put, it would not have been ‘entirely unreasonable’ for an officer to believe that the facts set out in the affidavit established a fair probability that such evidence would aid the prosecution of Bowen for the criminal acts at issue. . . . Whether any of these facts, standing alone or taken together, actually establish probable cause is a question we need not decide. Qualified immunity ‘gives government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments.’ al-Kidd, 563 U.S., at –––– (slip op., at 12). The officers’ judgment that the scope of the warrant was supported by probable cause may have been mistaken, but it was not ‘plainly incompetent.’. . . On top of all this, the fact that the officers sought and obtained approval of the warrant application from a superior and a deputy district attorney before submitting it to the magistrate provides further support for the conclusion that an officer could reasonably have believed that the scope of the warrant was supported by probable cause. . . . In light of the foregoing, it cannot be said that ‘no officer of reasonable competence would have requested the warrant.’. . Indeed, a contrary conclusion would mean not only that Messerschmidt and Lawrence were ‘plainly incompetent,’. . . but that their supervisor, the deputy district attorney, and the magistrate were as well. . . . ~~B~~y holding in Malley that a magistrate’s approval does not automatically render an officer’s conduct reasonable, we did not suggest that approval by a magistrate or review by others is irrelevant to the objective reasonableness of the officers’ determination that the warrant was valid. . . . The fact that the officers secured these approvals is certainly pertinent in assessing whether they could have held a reasonable belief that the warrant was supported by probable cause. . . . In contrast to Groh, any defect here would not have been obvious from the face of the warrant. Rather, any arguable defect would have become apparent only upon a close parsing of the warrant application, and a comparison of the affidavit to the terms of the warrant to determine whether the affidavit established probable cause to search for all the items listed in the warrant. This is not an error that ‘just a simple glance’ would have revealed. . . Indeed, unlike in Groh, the officers here did not merely submit their application to a magistrate. They also presented it for review by a superior officer, and a deputy district attorney, before submitting it to the magistrate. The fact that none of the officials who reviewed the application expressed concern about its validity demonstrates that any error was not obvious. Groh plainly does not control the result here. . . . The question in this case is not whether the magistrate erred in believing there was sufficient probable cause to support the scope of the warrant he issued. It is instead whether the magistrate so obviously erred that any reasonable officer would have recognized the error. The occasions on which this standard will be met may be rare, but so too are the circumstances in which it will be appropriate to impose personal liability on a lay officer in the face of judicial approval of his actions. Even if the warrant in this case were invalid, it was not so obviously lacking in probable cause that the officers can be considered ‘plainly incompetent’ for concluding otherwise. . . The judgment of the Court of Appeals denying the officers qualified immunity must therefore be reversed.") See also Schneyder v. Smith, 653 F.3d 313, 334 (3d Cir. 2011) ("One thing that Van de Kamp does not change is our characterization of the conduct in question as the nonperformance of a constitutional duty to advise the court of a significant change in the circumstances surrounding the detention of a material witness. We also continue to think that this duty is, broadly speaking, administrative rather than advocative. After Van de Kamp, we must ask the further question whether this is the sort of administrative duty the performance or nonperformance of which is protected by prosecutorial immunity. We hold that it is not. . . . After the continuance, the Overby case was a long way off, and it simply is not the prosecutor’s prerogative to decide how long to keep a material witness detained. Declining to reveal the change in Overby’s status was an abdication of Smith’s responsibility to provide the court with information sufficient for it to decide an issue within its sole competence. As the sole government official in possession of the relevant information, Smith had a duty of disclosure that was neither discretionary nor advocative, but was instead a purely administrative act not entitled to the shield of immunity, even after Van de Kamp.").
66		-The law enforcement and justice system’s perpetuation of competent/incompetent binaries institutionalize ableist violence and marginalization—rejecting them is a key form of resistance
67		-Brown 13: Lydia X.Z. Brown. Organizer, Editor, Writer, Speaker. Interrogation of competency in the mentally disabled subject. May 25, 2013. http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/05/interrogating-competency-in-mentally.html. RW
68		-Those of us who live with psychiatric, developmental, and neurological disabilities know intimately that our ~~the~~ ability to be regarded as competent, reliable, or trustworthy hinges closely on whether we are read as disabled or non-disabled, as mentally divergent or neurotypical, as mentally crippled or able-minded. Our perceptions, our ideas, our knowledge, our beliefs—these are routinely ascribed to feeble, addled minds presumed incapable of reasoned thought or objective belief. Just as marginalized bodies and minds are marked as abnormal, the ideas emanating from marginalized people are marked as incredible and dubious. There's an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit ("Educated Guess") that surprisingly did quite well in addressing the lived consequences of this reality—not once, but twice. Educated Guess opens with Detectives Fin and Rollins from the main cast waiting in a park to catch a man who's been groping women. When they see him, he strips naked in front of passerby and then collapses, stating that his girlfriend is physically present and mocking him although the detectives do not see her. The suspect, Darren Bickford, is taken to the psychiatric ward at LaGuardia for assessment, where it is suspected he has been under the influence of drugs. When Darren is left unguarded for a few minutes, he accidentally witnesses someone raping a woman on the ward and calls for help. During Darren's arraignment, which is held at the hospital, he describes the rape that he witnessed the night before only for Fin and Rollins to immediately disbelieve him and dismiss his story as unlikely and imaginary. The judge instructs them to investigate anyway. After questioning Darren further about the rape he witnessed, Detectives Benson and Rollins eventually identify the victim, Gia Eskas, who is a patient on the psychiatric ward. Over the course of most of the rest of the episode, they learn that Gia (who is initially reticent to disclose any information or admit to the rape having happened) has been raped repeatedly by her uncle George for ten years since she was fourteen. When she first told her mother, she was dismissed as simply crazy because of her psychiatric disabilities and she recanted. She is dismissed repeatedly over the episode as unbelievable, manipulative, and lying, and presented as having a history of making false rape accusations. At one point when Benson assures Gia that George will go to prison, Gia replies that that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world, she says, he's sane and I'm not. Even when the detectives arrest George in front of Gia's mother and aunt, all three of them insist that Gia is crazy and lying. The entire episode is predicated on the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with the presumption of incompetence so frequently hung onto the mentally disabled. The sad truth is that many in law enforcement and throughout the criminal justice system are all too prone to latch onto these insidious notions of (in)competency, thereby exculpating those responsible for violence against the disabled at the micro-level and reinforcing institutionalized violence against us at the macro-level. Law and Order SVU doesn't always do particularly well with representing disability. I've heard the show uncritically describe disabled adults as mentally toddlers and seen it frequently portray disabled people as using their disabilities as "excuses" for committing crime; in other places, I've seen the show portray disabled subjects in strictly stereotypical, flat roles useful as plot devices and not as subjects worthy of the same consideration in character development as abled subjects. But I was pleasantly surprised by the show's engagement with this question, with the question of competency for those of us who are mentally disabled. Perhaps that means a broader societal reconsideration of what it means to be competent and what the ramifications are of presuming incompetence, as well as the underlying causes of the phenomenon. After all,
69		-understanding the socio-cultural framework that informs the presumption of incompetence attached to disability, and to mental disability in particular, is critically important to any meaningful interrogation of the concept. There's an excellent book called Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia that examines the same phenomenon as experience by those whose bodies and subjectivities have been racialized, gendered, and classed. Along those lines, Joanna Kadi's paper "Stupidity Deconstructed" turns discourse on competency toward the usage of disability-rhetoric to enforces dominant class narratives that oppress the poor and working class. Yet there is the commonplace assertions of competency and independent agency by disabled people without intellectual or psychiatric disabilities who simultaneously state that they are neither "stupid" nor "mentally ill" in a direct move to sever themselves from a distinct part of the disability community while perpetuating another form of ableism. Works like James Trent's Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States and Michel Foucault's History of Madness seek to respond to such derisive contentions with explicit criticism of the categories of "mental retardation" and "madness" within the context of structural systems of cultural and political power. The core contention that all people ought to be presumed competent is itself dismissed as untenable by the very same cyclical arguments that posit that disability alone precludes reasoned or self-cognizant thought. Faced with this barrier, impenetrable within its necessitating framework, it is no wonder we encounter those who harp repeatedly that we are out of touch with reality, unaware of ourselves or those around us, incapable of expressing meaningful thought, and unable to make choices for ourselves, much less that we can or ought to be taken seriously or treated as subjective equals. Given this reality, it should hardly be surprising that disabled survivors of violence and abuse are so reticent to seek redress in a system that routinely assigns blame to the victims, dismisses them as incompetent to recognize what actually happened to them, and enacts further violence and brutality against them. After all, those are only the natural consequences of such ~~and~~ systemic ableism.
70		-
71		-====Particularity is the best standard for criticism ====
72		-**Price 98:**
73		-(RICHARD PRICE is a former prof in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Later, he moved to Johns Hopkins University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair. A decade of freelance teaching (University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Florida, Universidade Federal da Bahia), ensued. This article is co-authored with CHRISTIAN REUS-SMIT – Monash University – European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 1998 via SAGE Publications – http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~~courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/PriceReusSmithCriticalInternatlTheoryConstructivism.pdf)
74		-One of the central departures of critical international theory from positivism is the view that we cannot escape the interpretive moment. As George (1994: 24) argues, ‘the world is always an interpreted "thing", and it is always interpreted in conditions of disagreement and conflict, to one degree or another’. For this reason, ‘there can be no common body of observational or tested data that we can turn to for a neutral, objective knowledge of the world. There can be no ultimate knowledge, for example, that actually corresponds to reality per se.’ This proposition has been endorsed wholeheartedly by constructivists, who are at pains to deny the possibility of making ‘Big-T’ Truth claims about the world and studiously avoid attributing such status to their findings. This having been said, after undertaking sustained empirical analyses of aspects of world politics constructivists do make ‘small-t’ truth claims about the subjects they have investigated. That is, they claim to have arrived at logical and empirically plausible interpretations of actions, events or processes, and they appeal to the weight of evidence to sustain such claims. While admitting that their claims are always contingent and partial interpretations of a complex world, Price (1995, 1997) claims that his genealogy provides the best account to date to make sense of anomalies surrounding the use of chemical weapons, and Reus-Smit (1997) claims that a culturalist perspective offers the best explanation of institutional differences between historical societies of states. Do such claims contradict the interpretive ethos of critical international theory? For two reasons, we argue that they do not. First, the interpretive ethos of critical international theory is driven, in large measure, by a normative rejection of totalizing discourses, of general theoretical frameworks that privilege certain perspectives over others. One searches constructivist scholarship in vain, though, for such discourses. With the possible exception of Wendt’s problematic flirtation with general systemic theory and professed commitment to ‘science’, constructivist research is at its best when and because it is question driven, with self-consciously contingent claims made specifically in relation to particular phenomena, at a particular time, based on particular evidence, and always open to alternative interpretations. Second, the rejection of totalizing discourses based on ‘big-T’ Truth claims does not foreclose the possibility, or even the inevitability, of making ‘small-t’ truth claims. In fact, we would argue that as soon as one observes and interacts in the world such claims are unavoidable, either as a person engaged in everyday life or as a scholar. As Nietzsche pointed out long ago, we cannot help putting forth truth claims about the world. The individual who does not cannot act, and the genuinely unhypocritical relativist who cannot struggles for something to say and write. In short, if constructivists are not advancing totalizing discourses, and if making ‘small-t’ truth claims is inevitable if one is to talk about how the world works, then it is no more likely that constructivism per se violates the interpretive ethos of critical international theory than does critical theory itself.
75		-
76		-====The Law is inevitable, and changing it is a step in the right direction—alternatives cede the political to keep the left in check ====
77		-**Gilreath 14 **
78		-Shannon Gilreath - Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wake Forest University. "THE INTERNET AND INEQUALITY: A COMMENT ON THE NSA SPYING SCANDAL" - This Essay is an expanded version of remarks prepared for two live events, "Regulating Privacy on the Internet," held at Wake Forest University, from which this symposium issue of the Wake Forest Law Review emerged, and "Being Social: The Effects of Social Media on Our Lives," held at the University of Quebec at Montreal. 49 Wake Forest L. Rev. 525 – 2014 – available via google scholar and lexis.
79		-I have criticized obedience to the rule of law as a convenient cover for excessive use of power. Certainly, I believe this to be true in many cases. But the law is also-perhaps unfortunately-the best shot we have at dealing with immediate problems. I echo the late Ann Scales, who once said that "my heart need~~s~~ the world to change in more immediate and more enforceable ways than ~~are~~ observable from nonlegal political activism." 175 I certainly do not advocate abandoning the law as an instrument of change. Such is the work of postmodern theory, mostly the luxury of academics, and also, generally, a university-subsidized collection of "familiar if fancier reasons for doing nothing."176 As lawyers, we have to continue to use the law, as we know it, and as we invent it, to respond to governmental anti-equality intrusions into the everyday lives of citizens. One grassroots possibility would be to pressure Congress to change the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as written, requires telecommunications companies to build their networks in ways that make government surveillance of Internet activity possible, including the interception of e-mail and web traffic.177 Many of the contributions to this Symposium provide a range of other possibilities. 178 CONCLUSION Part of the problem of doing anything about the problem of the Internet and inequality is not only that we are dealing with power perpetuating itself-and power is a serious thing-but also that we are dealing with notions of reality with which people have become comfortable or, at least, in which they have largely surrendered in their protest. In this sense, technology itself is a panopticon. Its ubiquity is transforming society in its image, as well as the rule of law.179 At stake, now, in our new-or at least newly revealed-"United States of Surveillance" is nothing less than a democratic ideal, that is to say how a free society (however arbitrary that meaning may be) makes decisions about governing itself and dealing with the rest of the world. Any intelligent response must include the ingredients sketched in these remarks: a seriousness about the problem; a knowledge of history; a healthy skepticism regarding "national security" justifications for increasing governmental power; and a determination to change the present situation for the better. Beyond these, I leave you with an exhortation. In 1995, my heroine, the late Andrea Dworkin, gave a speech that she entitled "Remember, Resist, Do Not Comply."180 That is exactly what I am asking you to do with regard to the technologization of oppression and the NSA Internet surveillance program as an extension of that historical process: remember, resist, do not comply.

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1		-2016-11-19 17:43:02.0

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1		-Chris Castillo

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1		-Loyola DW

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1		-7

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1		-2

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1		-Lexington Weiler Aff

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1		-NOVDEC- 1AC- ADA

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1		-Glenbrooks