Disability Law Commons^™

The Lost Promise Of Disability Rights, Claire Raj

Michigan Law Review

Children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable students in public schools. They are the most likely to be bullied, harassed, restrained, or segregated. For these and other reasons, they also have the poorest academic outcomes. Overcoming these challenges requires full use of the laws enacted to protect these students’ affirmative right to equal access and an environment free from discrimination. Yet, courts routinely deny their access to two such laws—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (section 504).

Courts too often overlook the affirmative obligations contained in these two disability rights …

Threats To Medicaid And Health Equity Intersections, Mary Crossley

Articles

2017 was a tumultuous year politically in the United States on many fronts, but perhaps none more so than health care. For enrollees in the Medicaid program, it was a “year of living precariously.” Long-promised Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act also took aim at Medicaid, with proposals to fundamentally restructure the program and drastically cut its federal funding. These proposals provoked pushback from multiple fronts, including formal opposition from groups representing people with disabilities and people of color and individual protesters. Opposition by these groups should not have surprised the proponents of “reforming” Medicaid. Both people of …

Disability Rights And Labor: Is This Conflict Really Necessary?, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

In this Essay, I hope to do two things: First, I try to put the current labor-disability controversy into that broader context. Second, and perhaps more important, I take a position on how disability rights advocates should approach both the current controversy and labor-disability tensions more broadly. As to the narrow dispute over wage-and-hour protections for personal-assistance workers, I argue both that those workers have a compelling normative claim to full FLSA protection—a claim that disability rights advocates should recognize—and that supporting the claim of those workers is pragmatically in the best interests of the disability rights movement. As to …

Organ Transplantation Eligibility: Discrimination On The Basis Of Cognitive Disability, Tien-Kha Tran

Journal of Law and Policy

Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 in response to the extensive history of discrimination Americans with disabilities have faced. These federal statutes provide that no individual is to be precluded from enjoying the programs provided by certain entities solely on the basis of their disability. However, this is difficult in regards to organ transplantation and individuals with cognitive disabilities. The issue lies where a physician is faced with the difficult decision in pursuing their moral and ethical obligations to preserve life while determining whether a specific cognitive disability is a contraindication …

Retaliation And The Reasonable Person, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

When a worker complains about discrimination, federal law is supposed to protect that worker from later retaliation. Recent scholarly attention focuses on how courts limit retaliation claims by narrowly framing the causation inquiry. A larger threat to retaliation law is developing in the lower courts. Courts are declaring a wide swath of conduct as insufficiently serious to constitute retaliation.

Many courts hold that it is legal for an employer to threaten to fire a worker, to place the worker on administrative leave, or to negatively evaluate the worker because she complained about discriminatory conduct. Even if the worker has evidence …

The Ada And The Supreme Court: A Mixed Record, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

According to conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court has resisted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) at every turn. The Court, the story goes, has read the statute extremely narrowly and, as a result, stripped away key protections that Congress intended to provide. Its departure from congressional intent, indeed, was so extreme that Congress passed a statute that overturned several key decisions and codified broad statutory protections. That statute, the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA). passed with widespread bipartisan support, and President George W. Bush signed it into law. The conventional wisdom leaves out a major part of the story. …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

Designing A Flexible World For The Many: "Essential Functions" And Title I Of The Americans With Disabilities Act, Michael J. Powers

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note explores how courts interpret the meaning of “essential functions” under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act. To be protected under the ADA, a plaintiff must be able to perform the “essential functions” of her job with or without a reasonable accommodation. In general, courts follow one of two approaches when interpreting this phrase. The first approach narrowly focuses on the employer’s judgment regarding which functions are essential. The second approach considers the employer’s judgment, but looks beyond to consider the broader employment relationship. This Note argues that these different approaches have led to varying levels of …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …

Whither The Disability Rights Movement?, Robert W. Pratt

Michigan Law Review

While reading this book in 2010, almost twenty years to the date after President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disability Act ("ADA"), one realizes how much the world of politics has changed. It is difficult to remember a time when such major legislation passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 91 to 6 and the House of Representatives by 377 to 28. Even more surprising, as we look back to 1990, is the fact that the executive branch was controlled by a different political party than the legislative branch. Contrast this legislative record with the milieu surrounding …

What Best To Protect Transsexuals From Discrimination: Using Current Legislation Or Adopting A New Judicial Framework, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article specifically examines the issues and controversies that transsexual individuals have encountered as a result of their lack of protection under anti-discrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII. Part I is an overview of our society's binary sex/gender system and how this system serves to exclude and disenfranchise transsexuals. Part II examines the relationship between disability law and transsexuals, both explaining why they were excluded from the ADA and how state disability laws have provided more protection. Part III discusses how transsexuals have fared under a Title VII sex discrimination approach. This section also …

Barriers To Accessible Housing: Enforcement Issues In "Design And Construction" Cases Under The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reasonable Accommodation As Part And Parcel Of The Antidiscrimination Project, Mary Crossley

Articles

Numerous commentators have characterized the ADA's reasonable accommodation mandate - which sometimes requires employers to take affirmative steps that treat an individual with a disability differently from other workers - as a departure from the fundamental precepts of antidiscrimination law. These characterizations, however, fail to appreciate either the insights offered by disability theorists regarding the sources of inequality experienced by people with disabilities or the intrinsic conceptual kinship between the ADA's accommodation requirement and disparate impact liability and hostile environment liability under Title VII. Disability theory scholarship affirms that society's historic disregard for and devaluation of people with disabilities has …

Constitutional Doctrine As Paring Tool: The Struggle For "Relevant" Evidence In University Of Alabama V. Garrett, Pamela Brandwein

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article examines the difficulties involved in translating the social model of disability into the idiom of constitutional law. The immediate focus is University of Alabama v. Garrett. Both parts of this Article consider how disability rights claims collide with a discourse of legitimacy in constitutional law. Part I focuses on the arguments presented in several major Briefs filed in support of Garrett. Constitutional doctrines are conceived as paring tools and it is shown how the Court used these doctrines to easily pare down the body of evidence Garrett's lawyers sought to claim as relevant in justifying the ADA …

The Death Of Section 504, Ruth Colker

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article argues that the passage of the ADA had an unexpected consequence, namely the narrowing of the rights that were understood to exist under Section 504. Section 504 covered two broad areas of the law: the law of employment for individuals employed by entities receiving federal financial assistance and the law of education for students attending primary, secondary or higher education. The effect on the law of employment, which I will discuss in Part II, has been immediate and dramatic. The effect on the law of education, discussed in Part III, cannot yet be fully documented. Recent decisions, however, …

"What's Good Is Bad, What's Bad Is Good, You'll Find Out When You Reach The Top, You're On The Bottom": Are The Americans With Disabilities Act (And Olmstead V. L. C.) Anything More Than "Idiot Wind?", Michael L. Perlin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Mental disability law is contaminated by "sanism, " an irrational prejudice similar to such other irrational prejudices as racism and sexism. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-a statute that focused specifically on questions of stereotyping and stigma-appeared at first to offer an opportunity to deal frontally with sanist attitudes and, optimally, to restructure the way that citizens with mental disabilities were dealt with by the remainder of society. However, in its first decade, the ADA did not prove to be a panacea for such persons. The Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. - ruling that …

Disability, Equal Protection, And The Supreme Court: Standing At The Crossroads Of Progressive And Retrogressive Logic In Constitutional Classification, Anita Silvers, Michael Ashley Stein

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article compares current disability jurisprudence with the development of sex equality jurisprudence in the area of discrimination. It demonstrates that current disability law resembles the abandoned, sexist framework for determining sex equality and argues that disability equality cases should receive similar analysis as the more progressive, current sex equality standard. As such, the Article attempts to synthesize case law (14th Amendment Equal Protection jurisprudence) and statutory law (Title VII and the ADA) into a comprehensive overview of the state of current disability law viewed within the context of discrimination law in general.

Reforming Disability Nondiscrimination Laws: A Comparative Perspective, Stanley S. Herr

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Comparing the law and policies of other countries concerning disability rights to ours can help us understand how we may strengthen those rights and heighten compliance with nondiscrimination laws. Since it took effect in 1992, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been a leading example of such comprehensive legislation on behalf of people with disabilities. Along with the United Nations Standard Rules on Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities, the ADA has inspired many countries to develop their own disability nondiscrimination laws and remedial agencies. This process must work in both directions, however, and laws and agencies from …

Envisioning A Future For Age And Disability Discrimination Claims, Alison Barnes

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article considers the reasons for reinterpretations of age and disability and examines the fundamental reasons for changes in the implementation of both the ADA and ADEA. Part I presents the basic structure and relevant requirements of the two statutes and comments on the reasons their legislative purposes are not often seen as overlapping. Part II discusses the recent Supreme Court decisions that have undermined the purposes and implementation of both the ADA and ADEA and chilled causes of action based on the ADA and ADEA. Part III projects the current problems with anti-discrimination causes into the future, when older …

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …

Evaluating Purely Reproductive Disorders Under The Americans With Disabilities Act, Todd Lebowitz

Michigan Law Review

Approximately 2.8 million American couples suffer from infertility, a condition generally defined by the medical community as the failure to conceive after one year of unprotected intercourse. During the past thirty years, diagnostic and therapeutic techniques for treating infertility have improved drastically, enabling many previously infertile couples to bear children. These techniques, however, involve considerable expense and inconvenience, frequently requiring patients to take time off from work. Disputes with employers may follow, sometimes resulting in the infertile employee's termination. Some terminated employees, claiming that infertility constitutes a disability, then sue their former employers under the Americans with Disabilities Act of …

Improving Handicappers' Civil Rights In Michigan--Preventing Discrimination Through Accommodation, Aldebaran Bouse Enloe

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Part I of this Note explains the development of· the current state of handicappers' civil rights law in Michigan, beginning with legislative initiatives and progressing to administrative and judicial decisions. Part II analyzes traditional antidiscrimination theory and suggests how that theory can be adapted to handicappers. By examining hypothetical situations, Part III exposes the disparity between the current state of the law in Michigan and the proposed theoretical analysis and suggests amendments to the MHCRA to reconcile this disparity.

Employment Problems Of The Handicapped: Would Title Vii Remedies Be Appropriate And Effective?, Cornelius J. Peck

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article argues that the employment problems of the handicapped are not well-suited for treatment under a statutory discrimination model. Underlying this argument is the belief that the concept of discrimination is not adaptable to the problems of the handicapped, and efforts to apply it will only worsen existing problems. Part I begins by defining the meaning of discrimination, and then explores the similarities and differences between discrimination against the handicapped, and discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and national origin. The purpose of this discussion is to provide a basic framework for understanding claims that the handicapped should be …