By: Sherie L Griffiths MINSTLEX LL.B

Published by: Griffiths Legal Ltd

Foreword

Format: CD (Adobe pdf)

Price: £24.99 + VAT

Foreword

When I started in the law in 1988, the DDA was still a distant dream for campaigners. As for me, I tried to avoid it at all costs - not the Act itself, but the pressure to become a practicioner. As a guide dog owner, it just felt too much like a stereotype - "Lawyer with disability must do disability law". Well, not this one, I thought!; but as time went on and more and more people asked me about it, I began to change my mind.

Eventually I realized that I was particularly well-placed to interpret the Act for businesses. Aside from being a lawyer, I was, after all, a businesswoman myself as well as a former employee and current consumer with a disability - so I could come at the subject from four different angles.

I finally started researching it thoroughly in 2004 - at which point I let go of my prejudice and had to admit I found it a very interesting area. I went into law to work with people - and this law is all about people.

Later the same year I was asked to write a handbook for a charity. It soon became obvious that a more general version could be of use to a much wider audience, so I set about rewriting and expanding the text.

The original idea was to take the format which is so familiar to law students (where an Act is discussed and illustrated with decided cases) and adapt it for non-lawyers who need to understand this Act. In October 2004 a raft of major amendments to the DDA 1995 came into force - and one complaint I heard constantly from all quarters was that even the material designed to explain and summarise the changes was too bulky and/or complex to be of much help!

So I decided to pull together the Act, the Codes of Practice and relevant case-law into digestible sections, to create as complete a picture as possible of what the law says and how it really works in practice.

Over the last three years my writing has been constantly informed by the training, lectures and presentations I've delivered on this subject - or, more accurately, by the feedback from the people I've delivered to. This was always intended to be a practical guide rather than a legal textbook and all my students and other audiences have helped me keep that focus. It's all too easy, as a lawyer emursed in a particular legal subject, to assume you know what non-lawyers will want to know about it; but the danger is that you assume too much - or just get it plain wrong. By talking to students, employers, HR managers etc, I have had the chance to discover what the real issues are and, hopefully, to make sense of them here. I hope I've succeeded.

The law is not a static thing. It is constantly evolving and this book will have to do the same to keep pace. So all feedback is welcome and will come in very useful for future editions.

Sherie L Griffiths MINSTLEX LL.B

Tel: +44(0)1206 713662

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