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Equality law is audist

The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law is the first in a planned three-volume series examining how law recognises, protects and excludes deaf people, and developing Deaf Legal Studies as a distinct field of scholarship.

Deaf communities around the world continue to encounter Deaf Legal Exclusion through legal frameworks that define them narrowly and restrict their rights. Across the three volumes, the series examines the Dilemma created by the categories through which law recognises deaf people, the Illusion of rights that exist formally but fail to deliver equality in practice, and the Exclusion that follows when legal systems fail to recognise deaf people on their own terms.

The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law (vol 1)

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 failed to deliver equality in practice. It argues that the core problem is structural misrecognition: law protects deaf people primarily when they accept a definition based on disability, while sign language, culture and community are treated as secondary.

Drawing on doctrinal and socio-legal analysis of the Equality Act 2010, European Court of Human Rights case law and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the book examines how equality law relies on narrow conceptions of fairness. What appears to be inclusion can instead become a Deaf Legal Illusion: equality promised in principle but absent in practice.

The book explores formal, substantive and transformative approaches to equality alongside the Deaf Equality Concepts, assessing how far each reflects deaf people’s experiences.

It also examines five models through which deaf people are categorised in law and policy: disability, language minority, culturo-linguistic community, ethnic group and Indigenous group. In response, the Deaf Rights Model brings these together as complementary rather than competing ways of understanding deaf people and their rights.

The Deaf Legal Dilemma establishes Deaf Legal Studies as a field grounded in the priorities and expertise of deaf communities, inviting lawmakers, practitioners and scholars to rethink how law recognises deaf people and the structures through which their rights are realised.

The Deaf Legal Illusion: Law and Rights (vol 2)

The Deaf Legal Illusion: Law and Rights will examine laws and policies that appear to include and protect deaf people, asking whether legal rights and protections translate into meaningful equality in practice.

The volume is currently in development, with themes under consideration including:

• Access to justice
• Participation
• Language recognition
• Health and social care
• Administrative governance, including procurement and commissioning

Deaf Legal Exclusion: Case Studies Across Jurisdictions (vol 3)

Deaf Legal Exclusion: Case Studies Across Jurisdictions will examine what happens in practice when deaf people rely on the law. Through case studies from different jurisdictions, the volume will explore how legal rights are interpreted, applied and experienced in real cases.

The research will examine court decisions and, where possible, draw on the experiences of deaf people and legal professionals directly involved in significant cases.

The current plan includes case studies from the UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, Italy and Latvia.

Doctoral thesis

The three-volume series has its origins in my doctoral thesis, completed in 2020, which examined why equality law is not working for deaf people and what can be done to ensure that it does.

The thesis identified what I termed the Deaf Legal Dilemma: deaf people face a stark choice in law between accepting a disability-based identity in order to access rights or rejecting that categorisation and potentially losing access to those rights. It explored formal, substantive and transformative approaches to equality and examined how effectively existing equality and human rights frameworks address the inequalities experienced by deaf people.

Through doctrinal analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, European Convention on Human Rights, Equality Act 2010 and UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the thesis concluded that existing frameworks do not adequately address these inequalities. It proposed sign language recognition as a transformative response, capable of recognising deaf people in full cognisance of their status as Sign Language Peoples.