Disability Law Commons^™

Taking Disability Public, Jasmine E. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

Anti-discrimination laws enforce the idea that no one should be forced or encouraged to hide their race, gender, sexuality or other characteristics of their identity. So why is disability rights law the glaring exception? Other areas of anti-discrimination law have eschewed forms of enforced privacy about protected classes and, as a result, re-frame privacy norms as problematic, antigenic, and, at times, counter to structural reform goals. In contrast, disability rights law values privacy norms to preempt discrimination; in other words, if you never reveal the information, no one can discriminate against you because of that information. This Article argues that …

The Website Accommodations Test: Applying The Americans With Disabilities Act To Websites, Ashley Cheff

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

In 2017, 814 lawsuits were filed alleging discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) due to website inaccessibility, up from 262 in the previous year. Beginning in July 2010, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) considered issuing regulations under ADA Title III related to website accessibility. However, no changes have been made to date, leaving courts split over whether websites constitute places of public accommodation via the ADA. Dispositive to some jurisdictions’ holdings is whether a website has a nexus to a physical place, which may lend toward viewing the site as a public accommodation. Other jurisdictions provide that …

Table Of Contents, University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should Veterans Disability Compensation Be Conditional Upon Veterans Working Towards Rehabilitation And Return To Employment?, Heather Ansley, Aniela Szymanski

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has experienced dramatic increases in its budgets since September 11, 2001.1 Increasing federal deficits during this time has led Congress to seek spending cuts, causing tensions in efforts to ensure that a declining veteran population receives the quality benefits and services they earned through years of service.2While the number of veterans in the United States has steadily been declining due to veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam dying,3 the number of veterans receiving disability compensation has risen dramatically due to injuries sustained by service members in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and …

Challenging Transition-Related Care Exclusions Through Disability Rights Law, Kevin Barry

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Despite the growing visibility and acceptance of transgender people, discrimination against them persists.1 Transgender people are routinely denied identity documents that accurately reflect their sex.2 They are excluded from service in the U.S. military and from the protections of state civil rights laws.3 They are fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, turned away from homeless shelters, denied custody of their children, harassed by law enforcement, and deprived of access to appropriate single-sex services in schools, prisons, and immigration detention centers—because they are transgender.4

Parental Autonomy Over Prenatal End-Of-Life Decisions, Greer Donley

Articles

When parents learn that their potential child has a life-limiting, often devastating, prenatal diagnosis, they are faced with the first (and perhaps, only) healthcare decisions they will make for their child. Many choose to terminate the pregnancy because they believe it is in their potential child’s best interest to avoid a short and painful life. I argue that these decisions should be protected in the same way that parental healthcare decisions are constitutionally protected after birth—including a parent’s refusal or withdrawal of life-saving treatment for an infant or child who is very sick or dying. Parental autonomy ensures that parents …

Resolving Tensions Between Disability Rights Law And Covid-19 Mask Policies, Elizabeth Pendo, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Fighting For Deinstitutionalization In Nova Scotia: Emerald Hall Human Rights Case, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Those who have not been following the human rights complaint, MacLean v Nova Scotia, should start paying attention now. The case will be heard at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal in November. People First Canada, CACL and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities will intervene.

At stake is whether institutionalization counts as discrimination - and what, if anything, human rights can do to respond.

Beth MacLean, Joey Delaney and Sheila Livingstone, all persons labeled with intellectual disabilities, brought the complaint to the Nova Scotia human rights commission in 2014. The Disability Rights Coalition [DRC] joined in the complaint.

MacLean, …

Disability Rights In The Age Of Uber: Applying The Americans With Disabilities Act Of 1990 To Transportation Network Companies, Rachel Reed

Georgia State University Law Review

Within the past year, individual plaintiffs and disability rights organizations have initiated a number of lawsuits against Uber, and similar companies like Lyft, alleging violations of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Title III). In each of these cases, the plaintiffs’ success turns on affirmatively answering one significant threshold question: Whether Uber, or a similar entity, falls within the scope of Title III. Traditional taxi companies fall squarely within the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990’s (ADA) coverage under 42 U.S.C. § 12184 (§ 12184), which governs private companies that provide transportation services. Given the similarities …

Editor, "Health Care Law And The Rights Of Individuals With Disabilities", Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

People with disabilities are vulnerable. They carry high risk for poor health and health outcomes. As a group, they experience social disadvantages such as poverty, underemployment and unemployment, isolation, and discrimination at a higher rate than the general population. They also face multiple barriers to quality health care and report poorer health status than people without disabilities. This Special Issue will explore the key health disparities and barriers to health care experienced by people with disabilities, and explore the legal, ethical, and social issues they raise. It will investigate the legal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities and other antidiscrimination …

Immigration And Disability In The United States And Canada, Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

Disability arises from the dynamic between people’s physical and mental conditions andthe physical and attitudinal barriers in the environment. Applying this idea aboutdisability to United States and Canadian immigration law draws attention to barriers toentry and eventual citizenship for individuals who have disabilities. Historically, NorthAmerican law excluded many classes of immigrants, including those with intellectualdisabilities, mental illness, physical defects, and conditions likely to cause dependency.Though exclusions for individuals likely to draw excessive public resources and thosewith communicable diseases still exist in Canada and the United States, in recent yearsthe United States permitted legalization for severely disabled undocumented immigrantsalready in the …

Shelby, Race, And Disability Rights, Ravi Malhotra

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Egypt, Lila Meadows, Nadia Adib Bamieh, Janet E. Lord

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter is a factbook summarizing disability laws, organisations, and statistics in Egypt as of 2014.

Bridging The Barriers: Public Health Strategies For Expanding Drug Treatment In Communities, Ellen M. Weber

Ellen M. Weber

States around the country have begun to adopt programs to divert drug offenders from jails and prisons to community-based drug treatment services. For this strategy to succeed, local officials will need to expand the availability of outpatient and residential treatment programs and address the barriers to siting treatment services, the most significant of which are community opposition and government zoning policies that facilitate community resistance. Civil rights laws, including the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Fair Housing Act (FHA), prohibit zoning discrimination against persons with histories of alcoholism and drug dependence and provide a solid legal foundation for …

Impairment As Protected Status: A New Universality For Disability Rights, Michelle A. Travis

Georgia Law Review

This Article analyzes the fundamental change to federal
civil rights law that Congress accomplished through the
ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (the ADAAA). Congress
enacted the ADAAA in response to a series of United States
Supreme Court opinions that had narrowly interpreted the
definition of disability in the Americans with Disabilities
Act of 1990. Although many commentators have
recognized the ADAAA's intent to restore the class of
individuals with disabilities to the breadth that Congress
originally intended, this Article argues that the ADAAA
accomplished something more significant: it extricated
disability from the broader concept of impairment. As a
result, the …

Health Care And The Un Disability Rights Convention, Michael Ashley Stein, Penelope J S Stein, Dorothy Weiss, Raymond Lang

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

George Bush's America Meets Dante's Inferno: The Americans With Disabilities Act In Prison, Ira Robbins

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Introduction: The conditions in America's correctional facilities have long been cause for concern. Even those who do not advocate a comfortable quality of life for inmates recognize that basic problems such as overcrowding, inmate violence,' inadequate staffing,2 and increasing costs of building and maintaining prisons have approached crisis levels. Meanwhile, the prison population continues to swell. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the United States Department of Justice, the number of prisoners incarcerated at state and federal prisons annually has grown at a rate of 8.4% in recent years.'

George Bush's America Meets Dante's Inferno: The Americans With Disabilities Act In Prison, Ira P. Robbins

Ira P. Robbins

The Elwood Case: Vindicating The Educational Rights Of The Disabled, A. Wayne Mackay

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The guarantees of the Charter of Rights affect the definition of education for the disabled. The case of Elwood v. Halifax County - Bedford District School Board, a landmark case in educational rights of disabled children in Canada, has major implications for educational practice.

One of the earliest and most controversial Charter of Rights challenges to the existing educational structure has come from parents of disabled children. Disabled children and their parents are blazing a trail to define educational rights in Canada, and the process is giving some shape to the the elusive concept of equality enshrined in the …