Status of neurodiverse persons in administrative law

Abstract

This article deals with an issue in Polish administrative science that has been unheard of in practice until now – and not surprisingly – in the social sciences themselves, it emerged in the 1990s. While the concept of accessibility in legal science began to feature in legal deliberations around the 1970s, neurodiversity, sometimes also referred to as neurodivergence, neuroatypicality, is something that appears to be an issue for law – at least in Poland – that is exotic and unrecognised in practice, although not infrequently “touched upon” in legal practice. This publication is therefore one of the first in the field of administrative law, which not only raises the issue at all and tries to pave further paths (the author, due to his own conditions, decided to undertake this not easy task), but having in mind the two most famous contemporary manifestations of “neurodiversity”, i.e. the autism spectrum and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In view of the two most well-known contemporary manifestations of „neurodiversity”, i.e. autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the author attempts not only to signal the social situation, but also, apart from explaining the definition of neurodiversity, to assess the state of the literature on the subject, as well as the case law of administrative courts. The whole deliberation is crowned with a concrete summary and an attempt at a prognosis as to the direction we will have to take in the coming years and how this will affect the status of neurodiverse individuals, whose status, after all, from whichever side one looks at it, also appears to be a natural subject of interest, especially in the substantive part of administrative law.