What legal remedies are there for discrimination on the basis of weight and medical mistreatment of fat people?
There are two main legal recourses for addressing discrimination on the basis of weight. On the federal level, there is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (discussed below and on the newsgroup bit.listserv.ada-law). On the state and local levels there are anti-discrimination laws. Michigan’s anti-discrimination law explicitly lists weight as a protected characteristic (just like race and gender). A bill is pending in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to add weight to their list of protected categories. Contact Project 2000 if you’d like to work on this, especially if you live in Massachusetts and have a story to tell about discrimination based on weight. Here is a description of the ADA from Teresa Brady’s article “The Obese: A New Protected Class Under the Americans with Disabilities Act” published in *The International Journal of Applied Philosophy* 8:2, Winter/Spring 1994. (This article is hostile to the idea of obese people’s being covered under the ADA.) The ADA is
