Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education. By Arlene S. Kanter and Beth A. Ferri, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2013. 402 pp. $45.00 cloth.

• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12114

historicizing the struggles and contestations over the meaning of

addiction and the judiciary’s role in relation to social problems.

That emphasis, however, slowly fades in her analysis of the contem-

porary dynamics in the drug court field. The current field is

unproblematically generalized and described as a homogenous,

univocal field, composed of only “advocates” and “proponents,” as

if the struggles and contestations of the past have come to an end.

Tiger asserts that we live in a drug-obsessed society, in which

anything and everything is perceived as addictive. Within this context,

she encourages us to rethink our taken-for-granted ideas about

addiction and rehabilitation. As a thought-provoking challenge to the

dominant discourse, she wonders: “what if there is no such thing

as addiction, understood as a chronic relapsing condition best treated

through coerced sobriety?” (p. 38). Instead of the binary moral

discourse, in which there could only be “good” or “bad,” “natural” or

“contaminated,” “drug-free” or “addicted,” Tiger suggests a more

nuanced and useful perspective on self-control. Finally, we are

reminded, drug users are not all irrational helpless individuals living

in pain, but are also agentic, rational beings seeking pleasure. By

challenging the dominant perception of addiction and shedding light

on the way this perception has managed to infiltrate the criminal

justice system, Tiger’s Judging Addicts provides an important contri-

bution to the literature on the drug court movement, which has so far

been lacking this much needed critical attention.

References

Feld, Barry C. (1997) “Abolish the Juvenile Court: Youthfulness, Criminal Accountabil-

ity, and Sentencing Policy,” 88 J. of Criminal Law and Criminology 68–136.

Willrich, Michael (2003) City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. New

York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

∗∗∗

Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and

Education. By Arlene S. Kanter and Beth A. Ferri, eds. Syracuse:

Syracuse Univ. Press, 2013. 402 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Reviewed by Ravi Malhotra, Common Law Section, University of

Ottawa Faculty of Law

This exciting new anthology edited by Arlene Kanter and Beth

Ferri originates in the Disability Studies in Education Second City

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