Legal Commentary

?Handicapper?

By Eugene Volokh

A very stranger bit of legal usage ? in various Michigan statutes, for reasons that elude me, handicapped people were called ?handicappers? from 1976 to 1998. I have seen no examples of this usage in statutes or cases outside Michigan; there, when ?handicapper? is used at all, it?s used only in its standard dictionary sense of someone who handicaps races. The one exception outside Michigan was a 1984 Tennessee case that referred to ?Handicappers, Inc. Day Training Center (the successor-name of the United Cerebral Palsy Day Training Center).? A Google search found a few references to ?handicapper? to mean ?handicapped person? outside the context of Michigan law, but very few. How this made its way into Michigan law, and nowhere else, I don?t know.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on April 03, 2010 (boomark / email).