Disability Law Commons^™

Temporality In A Time Of Tam, Or Towards A Racial Chronopolitics Of Intellectual Property Law, Anjali Vats

Articles

This Article examines the intersections of race, intellectual property, and temporality from the vantage point of Critical Race Intellectual Property ("CRTIP"). More specifically, it offers one example of how trademark law operates to normalize white supremacy by and through judicial frameworks that default to Euro-American understandings of time. I advance its central argument-that achieving racial justice in the context of intellectual property law requires decolonizing Euro-American conceptions of time by considering how the equitable defense of laches and the judicial power to raise issues sua sponte operate in trademark law. I make this argument through a close reading of the …

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’ …

A Study Of Social Security Disability Litigation In The Federal Courts, Jonah B. Gelbach, David Marcus

All Faculty Scholarship

A person who has sought and failed to obtain disability benefits from the Social Security Administration (“the agency”) can appeal the agency’s decision to a federal district court. In 2015, nearly 20,000 such appeals were filed, comprising a significant part of the federal courts’ civil docket. Even though claims pass through multiple layers of internal agency review, many of them return from the federal courts for even more adjudication. Also, a claimant’s experience in the federal courts differs considerably from district to district around the country. District judges in Brooklyn decide these cases pursuant to one set of procedural rules …

Health And Taxes: Hospitals, Community Health And The Irs, Mary Crossley

Articles

The Affordable Care Act created new conditions of federal tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals, including a requirement that hospitals conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years to identify significant health needs in their communities and then to develop and implement a strategy responding to those needs. As a result, hospitals must now do more than provide charity care to their patients in exchange for the benefits of tax exemption, and the CHNA requirement has the potential both to prompt a radical change in hospitals’ relationship to their communities and to enlist hospitals as meaningful contributors to community …

Social Support Substitution And The Earnings Rebound: Evidence From A Regression Discontinuity In Disability Insurance Reform, Lex Borghans, Anne C. Gielen, Erzo F. P. Luttmer

Dartmouth Scholarship

We exploit a cohort discontinuity in the stringency of Dutch disability reforms to estimate the effects of decreased DI (disability insurance) generosity on behavior of existing recipients. We find evidence of social support substitution: individuals on average offset €1.00 of lost DI benefits by collecting €0.30 more from other social assistance programs, but this benefit-substitution effect declines over time. Individuals also exhibit a rebound in earnings: earnings increase by €0.62 on average per euro of lost DI benefits and this effect remains roughly constant over time. This is strong evidence of substantial remaining earnings capacity among long-term claimants of DI.

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

A Critical Research Agenda For Wills, Trusts And Estates, Bridget J. Crawford, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

The law of wills, trusts, and estates could benefit from consideration of its development and impact on people of color; women of all colors; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered individuals; low-income and poor individuals; the disabled; and nontraditional families. One can measure the law’s commitment to justice and equality by understanding the impact on these historically disempowered groups of the laws of intestacy, spousal rights, child protection, will formalities, will contests, and will construction; the creation, operation and construction of trusts; fiduciary administration; creditors’ rights; asset protection; nonprobate transfers; planning for incapacity and death; and wealth transfer taxation. This essay …

Giving Meaning To 'Meaningful Access' In Medicaid Managed Care, Mary Crossley

Articles

As states seek to shift Medicaid recipients with disabilities out of traditional fee-for-service settings and into managed care plans, vexing questions arise about the impact on access to needed care and providers for beneficiaries with medically complex needs. With many states expanding their Medicaid program as part of health care reform and cost-containment pressures continuing to mount, this movement will likely accelerate over the next several years. This Article examines the possibility that disability discrimination law might provide a mechanism for prodding states in the planning stage to anticipate and plan for likely access issues, as well as for challenging …

Unprotected Sex: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act At 35, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Articles

Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to overturn a Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize pregnancy discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex. Now, three and a half decades later, women whose work lives are impacted by pregnancy are again finding themselves unprotected from discrimination. Lower court rulings have eviscerated the Act’s protections at the same time that an expansion of worker rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act should redound to the benefit of pregnant women by expanding the pool of comparators who receive accommodations. By following trends in discrimination law generally - equating …

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerations, Christopher L. Griffin Jr., John J. Donohue Iii, Michael Ashley Stein, Sascha Becker

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (“PSID”), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65 as well as a subset of 1437 individuals appearing every year from 1981 to 1996. Our analysis of the larger sample suggests the …

Counting Working-Age People With Disabilities: What Current Data Tell Us And Options For Improvement, Andrew J. Houtenville Editor, David C. Stapleton Editor, Robert R. Weathers Editor, Richard V. Burkhauser Editor

Upjohn Press

This book offers a systematic review of what current statistics and data on working-age people with disabilities can and cannot tell us, and how the quality of the data can be improved to better inform policymakers, advocates, analysts, service providers, administrators, and others interested in this at-risk population.

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …

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, …

Safety Practices, Firm Culture, And Workplace Injuries, Richard J. Butler, Yong-Seung Park

Upjohn Press

The authors present analysis of the impact of various HRM practices on firms’ workers’ compensation costs; specifically, which practices lower firms’ workers’ compensation costs and whether the impact is the result of changes in technical efficiency or comes through induced changes in workers’ behavior.

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 …

The Labor Market Experience Of Workers With Disabilities: The Ada And Beyond, Julie L. Hotchkiss

Upjohn Press

This book focuses on the labor market provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It provides a comprehensive analysis of the current labor market experience of American workers with disabilities and an assessment of the impact the ADA has had on that experience.

The Decline In Employment Of People With Disabilities: A Policy Puzzle, David C. Stapleton Editor, Richard V. Burkhauser Editor

Upjohn Press

The book begins with a documentation of the employment rate decline and ends by spelling out the implications of this decline for public policy. However, the bulk of the book provides a detailed examination of the various explanations for the puzzling decline in employment among the working-aged population with disabilities.

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 …

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 …

The Disability Kaleidoscope, Mary Crossley

Articles

The question of whom our society truly wants to protect from adverse discrimination based on bodily difference is ultimately a question for the body politic. The aim of this article, by contrast, is to use the analytical tools provided by scholars in the field of disability studies to scrutinize how lawmakers to date have understood the concept of impairment as one form of bodily difference. By viewing administrative and judicial treatments of impairment through a disability studies lens, I have sought to give the disability kaleidoscope a turn and thus to provide the reader with an altered view of impairment …

Growth In Disability Benefits: Explanations And Policy Implications, Kalman Rupp Editor, David C. Stapleton Editor

Upjohn Press

This collection of original papers reveals why caseloads of the nation's two largest income entitlement programs for disability - Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) - have soared.

Disability, Work And Cash Benefits, Jerry L. Mashaw Editor, Virginia P. Reno Editor, Richard V. Burkhauser Editor, Monroe Berkowitz Editor

Upjohn Press

This book examines the economic consequences of work disabilities, and public and private interventions that might enable disabled individuals to enter the work force for the first time, remain at work, or return to work. Three groups of papers are presented. The first group examines ways that labor market changes, policy interventions and individual choices shape the work force. The next analyzes both public and private return to work policies for the work disabled and for those with a severely disabling condition. The final group focuses on the specific needs of the disabled that affect their work force participation, including …

Medical Futility And Disability Discrimination, Mary Crossley

Articles

The concept of medical futility, which originally developed in the medical literature as a basis for allocating between physician and patient decisional authority regarding end-of-life treatment, is increasingly appearing in discussions regarding possible methods of containing medical costs by limiting treatment. This use of medical futility as a rationing mechanism, whether by a state Medicaid program or by a hospital, raises concerns regarding its impact on persons with severe disabilities near the end of life. This article considers how the applicability of the Americans with Disabilities Act to cost-conscious futility policies might be analyzed. After developing arguments that proponents and …

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 …

Permanent Disability Benefits In Workers' Compensation, Monroe Berkowitz, John F. Burton

Upjohn Press

Berkowitz and Burton provide a detailed examination of the adequacy and equity of permanent partial disability benefits, and the efficiency of the system delivering those benefits. A ten-state study is presented that examines states' criteria for awarding scheduled and nonscheduled benefits. Three of those states are then used for a wage-loss study illustrating the relationship among workers' disability ratings, the workers' WC benefits, and losses of earnings caused by work-related injuries.