[Silhouette]

The one big problem I have encountered with anti-discrimination laws is that sometimes they can be written too rigidly and become counter-productive.

For example, there is a well-known road full of small boutique shops, cafes, etc. in a city where I used to live. Some of those places were visibly adapted to allow things like wheelchair access, ticking all the relevant legal boxes under our disability discrimination laws. Some of them were in older buildings that couldn't easily provide the physical allowances that we'd probably design in from the start today, but they had friendly staff who were very willing to help wheelchair users or others with disabilities, and these places also seemed to be well regarded by local people who needed that help. So far, so good.

It's hard to tell exactly what happened next because there's so much hearsay with these things, but it appears that one day someone in a wheelchair decided to retain a lawyer and possibly just went along that street bringing legal actions against anywhere that wasn't absolutely compliant with the letter of the law. This posed an existential threat to some of those small businesses, even though in fact they were very disabled-friendly and often had regular customers with disabilities who were quick to come to their defence. I'm not sure how those legal actions were resolved or whether they're still ongoing, and there were some other unrelated local problems that certainly weren't making life any easier for the people running those establishments around the same time so it's hard to know whether the businesses that have closed were closed because of this. But if nothing else, this use of the legal system by apparently just one single individual has surely caused a huge amount of distress to many good people and possibly cost a lot of businesses what was for them a lot of money without necessarily making anything materially better for the people these laws were supposed to protect.

As the saying goes, this is why we can't have nice things.

[Moru]

This is not a problem with the anti-discrimination laws but with the justice system itself. In Sweden there is no meaning to get a lawyer and sue everyone because it won't be worth the money for the lawyer. So we do get to have nice things :-)

[Silhouette]

So how do you give effect to people's legal rights under less controversial conditions? And how do lawyers make their livings, if it's never worth hiring them? I'm confused...