Disability Law Commons^™

Medical Civil Rights As A Site Of Activism: A Reply To Critics, Craig Konnoth

Publications

See Craig Konnoth, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 1165 (2020).

See also Rabia Belt & Doron Dorfman, Response, Reweighing Medical Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 176 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/reweighing-medical-civil-rights/; Allison K. Hoffman, Response, How Medicalization of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 165 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/how-medicalization-of-civil-rights-could-disappoint/.

Medicalization And The New Civil Rights, Craig Konnoth

Publications

In the last several decades, individuals have advanced civil rights claims that rely on the language of medicine. This Article is the first to define and defend these “medical civil rights” as a unified phenomenon.

Individuals have increasingly used the language of medicine to seek rights and benefits, often for conditions that would not have been cognizable even a few years ago. For example, litigants have claimed that discrimination against transgender individuals constitutes illegal disability discrimination. Others have argued that their fatigue constitutes chronic fatigue syndrome (which was, until recently, a novel and contested diagnosis) to obtain Social Security disability …

Discrimination Against The Unhealthy In Health Insurance, Mary Crossley

Articles

As employers seek to contain their health care costs and politicians create coverage mechanisms to promote individual empowerment, people with health problems increasingly are forced to shoulder the load of their own medical costs. The trend towards consumerism in health coverage shifts not simply costs, but also insurance risk, to individual insureds, and the results may be particularly dire for people in poor health. This Article describes a growing body of research showing that unhealthy people can be expected disproportionately to pay the price for consumerism, not only in dollars, but in preventable disease and disability as well. In short, …

Infected Judgment: Legal Responses To Physician Bias, Mary Crossley

Articles

Substantial evidence indicates that clinically irrelevant patient characteristics, including race and gender, may at times influence a physician's choice of treatment. Less clear, however, is whether a patient who is the victim of a biased medical decision has any effective legal recourse. Heedful of the difficulties of designing research to establish conclusively the role of physician bias, this article surveys published evidence suggesting the operation of physician bias in clinical decision making. The article then examines potential legal responses to biased medical judgments. A patient who is the subject of a biased decision may sue her doctor for violating his …