The Deaf Legal Dilemma

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 not delivered equality in practice. It argues that the core issue is structural misrecognition: law protects deaf people only when they accept a definition based on disability. Sign language, culture and community are treated as secondary.

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

Formal, substantive and transformative precepts of equality and the Deaf Equality Concepts are explored, assessing their ability to reflect deaf people’s experiences.

The book analyses five models used to categorise deaf people in law and policy: disability, language minority, culturo-linguistic community, ethnic group and Indigenous group. In response, the Deaf Rights Model is proposed, which brings the five models together as complementary rather than competing.

The Deaf Legal Dilemma establishes Deaf Legal Studies as a field grounded in the priorities and expertise of deaf communities. It invites lawmakers, practitioners and scholars to rethink the purpose of the law and the structures through which deaf people are recognised.