Disability Law Commons^™

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 …

Substantially Limited Justice?: The Possibilities And Limits Of A New Rawlsian Analysis Of Disability-Based Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

Articles

John Rawls has been called the most significant and influential moral philosopher of the twentieth century, and his ideas have deeply influenced discussions of social, political, and economic justice across disciplines including law, philosophy, and political science. Given his preeminence, does Rawls's theory of justice as fairness fail in either of the two ways described above or is it a promising analysis for achieving justice for people with disabilities?

In its most recent terms, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned its attention toward the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (the ADA). In several significant decisions, it has grappled with …

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 …