Disability Law Commons^™

Community Integration Of People With Disabilities: Can Olmstead Protect Against Retrenchment?, Mary Crossley

Articles

Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, states have made significant progress in enabling Americans with disabilities to live in their communities, rather than institutions. That progress reflects the combined effect of the Supreme Court’s holding in Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel. Zimring, that states’ failure to provide services to disabled persons in the community may violate the ADA, and amendments to Medicaid that permit states to devote funding to home and community-based services (HCBS). This article considers whether Olmstead and its progeny could act as a check on a potential retrenchment of states’ …

Rescuing Baby Doe, Mary Crossley

Articles

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Baby Doe Rules offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on how much has changed during the past two-and-one-half decades and how much has stayed the same, at least in situations when parents and physicians face the birth of an infant who comes into the world with its life in peril.

The most salient changes are the medical advances in the treatment of premature infants and the changes in social attitudes towards and legal protections for people with disabilities. The threshold at which a prematurely delivered infant is considered viable has advanced steadily earlier into pregnancy, …

Disability, Reciprocity, And 'Real Efficiency': A Unified Approach, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires private employers to offer reasonable accommodation to disabled persons capable of performing the core elements of a job. Some economists have attacked the statute as ill-advised and inefficient. In examining the efficiency of the ADA, this article analyzes its cost-effectiveness against the following social and legal background conditions: First, society will honor a minimum commitment to provide basic support to persons - including the medically disabled - who, through no fault of their own, cannot earn enough to maintain a minimally decent standard of living. Second, legal and pragmatic factors, including "sticky" or …

Of Diagnoses And Discrimination: Discriminatory Nontreatment Of Infants With Hiv Infection, Mary Crossley

Articles

Evidence of physician attitudes favoring the withholding of needed medical treatment from infants infected with HIV compels a reassessment of the applicability and adequacy of existing law in dealing with selective nontreatment. Although we can hope to have learned some lessons from the Baby Doe controversy of the mid-1980s, whether the legislation emerging from that controversy, the Child Abuse Amendments of 1984, has ever adequately dealt with the problem of nontreatment remains far from clear. Today, the medical and social characteristics of most infants infected with HIV introduce new variables into our assessment of that legislation. At stake are the …