Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
This essay reviews Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the changes in legal imagination that accompanied the rise of workers' compensation programs. The essay foregrounds Holdren’s insights about disability. Injury Impoverished illustrates the meaning and material consequences that the law has given to work-related impairments over time and documents the naturalization of disability-based exclusion from the formal labor market. In the present day, with so many social benefits tied to employment, this exclusion is particularly troubling.
Keywords
Disability, social welfare, torts, workers' compensation, legal history, capitalism, workplace injuries, civil justice
Publication Title
Michigan Law Review
Repository Citation
Tani, Karen M., "Compensation, Commodification, and Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies and Excluded Nonlaboring Humans" (2021). All Faculty Scholarship. 2264.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2264
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Disability Law Commons, Disability Studies Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Labor and Employment Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal History Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Social Welfare Commons, Social Welfare Law Commons, Work, Economy and Organizations Commons, Workers' Compensation Law Commons
Publication Citation
119 Mich. L. Rev. 1269 (2021)