Legal historian, Seaman Family University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972, Karen Tani presented the 2026 Mary Frosch Justice and Equity Lecture. Tani’s research and teaching sits at the intersection of legal history, civil rights law, and social welfare policy.

Focused primarily on how disability has shaped American governance and public policy in the 20th century, Tani presented to Upper School students and faculty on disability rights in modern US history, including the events that led to the disability rights movement in the 1970s and the eventual approval of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Tani highlighted the complex legislative and cultural nature of the present, summarizing that we are in a moment “where disability-based discrimination is anathema, and yet exclusion remains baked into many structures and practices where disability rights seem at once robust and entirely negotiable.” 

At the end of her lecture, Tani asked students to continue contemplating the complex history of disability rights, and to consider and reflect: are disability civil rights different from other civil rights, and if so, why might that matter? When vindicating a person’s equality/inclusion rights imposes costs, who should we pay, and how should we decide?

About the Mary Frosch Lecture Series

Established by the Board of Trustees upon her retirement in 2015, the Mary Frosch Lecture for Equity and Justice brings in an annual speaker and salutes Mary’s deep and enduring dedication to equity throughout her more than 30 years of teaching at Spence. Past speakers have included Jane Kim, Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Leticia Smith-Evans Haynes '95, and Kenji Yoshino.