Harlan Hahn, 68: USC professor championed disability rights
Saturday, May 10th, 2008From the Los Angeles Times:
Harlan Hahn, a longtime USC professor of political science and champion of disability rights who successfully sued the university to improve access for disabled people campuswide, died April 23 at his Santa Monica home. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter, Emily.
Hahn was already in the vanguard of the disability rights movement when he joined the USC faculty to teach political science in 1972. He pushed for the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited discrimination against the disabled, and the more sweeping Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
Hahn, who had polio as a child, brought a lawsuit against USC in 1998 to remove physical barriers that limited the mobility of disabled individuals. The suit was settled in 2001 when the university agreed to embark upon a major barrier removal effort.
He also wrote or co-wrote a dozen books, and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the 1983 case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman who was paralyzed and petitioned the court to let her starve to death. Hahn argued that disabled people needed better support, not help in dying.
“Ultimately, a disability is not an organic deficiency,” Hahn wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1983, “it is the product of a disabling environment. . . . To deprive any member of the disabled population of the mental and emotional strength that he or she can contribute to others would be an unforgivable act.”
See also the press release from USC: In Memoriam: Harlan Hahn, 68; The USC College political scientist was a major force in the disability rights movement
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