It's hard to pinpoint when I began writing this book. When I authored the article entitled “Anti-Subordination Above All: Sex, Race, and Equal Protection” in the New York University Law Review in 1986, I was not yet thinking seriously about disability issues on a theoretical level. As I began to do volunteer legal work for individuals with HIV in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1986, I began to learn a great deal about how society mistreats many individuals with disabilities. And I began to see the challenges faced by the political and judicial systems in fashioning effective remedies when such discrimination has taken place.

I joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1993, and I began to think more systematically about disability issues as I began teaching in this area of the law and writing one of the first casebooks for students to use to study the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). For the next decade, my work on disability was mostly of a practical nature. I conducted empirical research on the effectiveness of the ADA, wrote extensively about its legislative history, and analyzed whether the decisions under this statute were consistent with Congress's intent. During those many years of devoting myself to legal issues involving disability, I did not seek to develop a theory to explain my various views on this topic.