Rights Enabled: The Disability Revolution from the US, to Germany and Japan, to the United Nations. By Katharina Heyer. Michigan: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2015. 260 pp. $40.00 paperback.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12271
• Date: 01 June 2017
• Published date: 01 June 2017

Rights Enabled: The Disability Revolution from the US, to Germany

and Japan, to the United Nations. By Katharina Heyer. Michigan:

Univ. of Michigan Press, 2015. 260 pp. $40.00 paperback.

Reviewed by Sagit Mor, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa

Disability theory and disability rights are rapidly growing fields of

inquiry in law, social sciences, and the humanities yet still largely

neglectedinsocio-legaltheory.Rights Enabled by Katharina Heyer is

an original, timely, and highly important contribution to the emerging

field of disability legal studies, which integrates the tenets of disability

studies with critical legal theory and socio-legal theory to create a rich

account of the socio-legal construction of disability. Rights Enabled

brings together classical questions of socio-legal theory relating to

social movements, rights consciousness and the globalization of rights,

and core questions of disability studies concerning the contextual,

interactive, and relational nature of disability. The result is a rich and

complex account of disability rights in action.

Specifically, this book contributes to the fields of law and social

movements and the globalization of rights by examining the global

shift to disability rights in four different locations: the United States,

Germany, Japan, and the United Nations. Previous studies of these

locations were conducted in isolation and none was anchored in

socio-legal theory, although did enrich socio-legal research. The US

disability movement received most attention, told by disabilityrights

activists (e.g., Fleischer and Zames 2012; Shapiro 1994) and legal

scholars (Bagenstos 2014). In contrast, Japan and Germany

received little attention in English speaking scholarship (Hayashi

and Okuhira 2001; K€

obsell 2006). The international arena was first

examined in the renowned book Nothing About Us Without Us

(Charlton 1998), which explored the development of the global dis-

ability rights movement, and received an increasing attention since

the adoption of the International Convention on the Rights of Per-

sons with Disabilities, 2006 (CRPD) (Sabatello and Schulze 2013).

Rights Enabled offers a comparative view of the social processes

that led to the formulation of different structures of disability rights

in each location while attending to their unique national histories,

different cultures, diverse forms of activism, and particularly differ-

ent legacies of rights and social welfare. The analysis does not treat

each location in isolation, but rather focuses on the flow of ideas

and actions from one locale to another, thereby interweaving them

to create a thick account of “how disability rights travel” in an

increasingly globalized world.

454 Book Reviews