Caroline Gooding

Caroline Gillian Gooding (7 March 1959 – 19 July 2014) was a British solicitor and activist for disabled people. She took up activism after having a stroke while in her early 20s. Gooding directed her efforts to publishing literature advocating a human rights-based approach to disability, advising, assisting and leading governmental disability commissions, and drafting government legislation to improve the status of disabled individuals, such as the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and the Equality Act 2010. The Caroline Gooding Memorial Lecture is named after the activist.

Early life and education Gooding was born in the Scottish city of Glasgow on 7 March 1959. She was the daughter of the general practitioner Keith Gooding and his wife Jessie (née Strange). At the age of two, Gooding and her family moved to London, and was educated at the St Paul's Girls' School. She graduated with a first in history and social and political science at the University of Cambridge in 1982 and trained to be a solicitor at the College of Law in London, qualifying in 1986. Gooding joined a firm in Newcastle soon after. The following year, Gooding was instrumental in causing the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) and published Blackstone’s Guide to the DDA in 1996. It provided the legal system for standards to apply and earned her the reputation of "combining principle, realism and approachability to good effect." In 2005, she co-edited a publication on European disability rights and worked with the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. That year, Gooding was instrumental in drafting the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and advocated public bodies to abide by a new obligation to promote equality within the disability spectrum. During this period, she continued to refer key legal cases to the DRC and disagreed with the Labour government's decision to disband it and subsume its functions into the Equality and Human Rights Commission.