The Section 504 Trainings

One article-in-progress, coauthored with legal historian Karen Tani, considers the co-production of law and citizenship at an important moment in the history of the administrative state. In “‘This is Our Law’: Delegated Governance and Disabled Citizenship at the End of the New Deal Order,” we examine governmentally funded trainings that were administered by disability advocacy organizations and run by disabled trainers after the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 was the first civil rights statute for people with disabilities, and after the passage of the regulations, the government funded national trainings by disability rights organizations aimed at educating people about their rights under the new law. We argue that these trainings are properly understood as “delegated governance,” which political scientists define as private actors taking on governing functions. Drawing from the insights of legal historians, as well as theories about bureaucratic political development by political scientists, we consider the significance of these trainings using archival material from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF). Specifically, we suggest that organizations, with little oversight from HEW, were able to materially shape how the new regulations were implemented by instructing trainees that they could directly negotiate their needs with government agencies. This “rights-bearing mindset,” as it was called de-centered courts as the site where the 504 regulations were given substance and instilled a sense of ownership in disabled trainees. Trainees left with the impression that this was their law. Although the expectation of citizen enforcement created its own exclusions, the 504 Trainings are an example of civil rights enforcement outside of the federal courts and the “litigation state,” as traditionally construed.