Disability Law Commons^™

Introduction: Understanding The Context For The “Coelho Challenge”, Seth D. Harris

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Access To The Courts: A Blueprint For Successful Litigation Under The Americans With Disabilities Act And The Rehabilitation Act, Marc Charmatz, Antoinette Mcrae

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

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

All Faculty Scholarship

In its recent terms, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned its attention toward the Americans with Disabilities Act, and specifically the questions of who should be protected under the ADA, and what such protection requires. In the wake of the Court's decisions, workers have found it increasingly difficult to assert and protect their right to be free of disability-based discrimination in the workplace. Given the widespread influence of John Rawls in contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice, his recent and final formulation of his theory of distributive justice presents a significant and promising philosophical foundation for evaluation of …

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 …

Discrimination Cases In The Supreme Court’S 1998 Term, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

In the Supreme Court's 1997 Term, the Supreme Court had decided a record number of statutory discrimination cases. However, that record was exceeded in the Supreme Court's 1998 Term with the Court addressing issues arising under Title VII, which covers discrimination in employment; Title IX, which covers discrimination in schools; and most significantly, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. Overall, the term scored significant victories for employers who were given considerable latitude to set their own physical characteristic standards and who were, to a large extent, immunized from liability for punitive damages. There was an …

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 …

Threshold Barriers To Title 1 And Title Iii Of The Americans With Disabilities Act: Discrimination Against Mental Illness In Long-Term Disability Benefits, Nancy Lee Firak

Journal of Law and Health

Any discussion of the ADA presents an organizational challenge not only because of the complex structure of the Act itself, but also because the ADA implicates other complex federal remedial schemes such as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the Rehabilitation Act. The social policy implications of the issues under discussion in this article are complex and at times even contradictory, as is perhaps unavoidable. Part II outlines a typical case in which the employer provided inferior long-term disability benefits to those with mental disabilities. The purpose of Part II is to provide the reader with a map …

"Substantially Limited" Protection From Disability Discrimination: The Special Treatment Model And Misconstructions Of The Definition Of Disability, Robert Burgdorf

Journal Articles

DISABILITY' nondiscrimination laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA),2 and the disability rights movement which spawned them have, at their core, a central premise that is both simple and profound. That premise is that people denominated as "disabled" are just people, not different in any critical way from other people. Paradoxically, commentators, enforcement agencies and the courts, with manifest good intentions, have frequently interpreted and applied these laws in ways that reinforce a diametrically opposite premise-that people with disabilities are significantly different, special and need exceptional status and protection, One is reminded of Justice Brandeis's admonition …

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 …