Disability Law Commons^™

The Americans With Disabilities Act And Academic Libraries In The Southeastern United States, Linda Lou Wiler, Eleanor Lomax

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

Individuals with disabilities are one of the fastest-growing segments of United States society. In 1970, 11.7% of the United States population was limited in activity, a major factor in measuring and identifying people with disabilities. In 1990, because of the aging of America, 13.7 % of the population could be so identified. By 1994, 15% of the population fell into this group. During this latter period, the older population stayed fairly stable but children and younger adults with disabilities increased greatly. Many different figures, depending upon the method of counting, e.g., age groups included, or whether residence was in a …

Empirical Implications Of Title I, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Law Schools Are Doing To Accommodate Students With Learning Disabilities, Donald H. Stone

All Faculty Scholarship

The year 2000 marks the tenth anniversary of the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). It also marks a quarter century since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (“EAHCA”). The EAHCA opened the doors for disabled children to receive a free and appropriate education. As a result of this special education law, many disabled young people were able to succeed and are now knocking at law schools' doors seeking admission.

On July 26, 1990, Congress enacted the ADA, a landmark civil rights bill designed to open up all aspects of American life to …

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 …

Constitutional Protection For Conversations Between Therapists And Clients, Paul E. Salamanca

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

People have long perceived a connection between mental and even physical illness and physical anguish. Yet, modern culture tends to view both types of illness from an increasingly medical perspective, seeking a genetic or environmental explanation. In most cases, this “medical model” is probably the best approach, even if it is imperfect. First, the purely medical explanation may be accurate. Second, even if it is not accurate, treating the symptoms of a disease with a spiritual source is probably easier than treating the source itself. Ultimately, however, we must take note that disease is often not the result of genetics …

Applying The Ada To Mitigating Measures Cases: A Choice Of Statutory Evils, Lisa A. Eichhorn

Faculty Publications

This Article critiques the idea that the ADA should exclude from its coverage people who use mitigating measures, such as medications and medical devices, to alleviate the effects of their mental and physical impairments. After describing the statute as an expansive but flawed tool for combating disability-based discrimination, the Article analyzes a 1999 trilogy of Supreme Court cases holding that in determining whether a person has a disability for purposes of ADA coverage, courts should take account of the ameliorative effects of so-called mitigating measures on the person’s impairments. Through this holding, the Court inappropriately constricted the scope of the …

Major Litigation Activities Regarding Major Life Activities: The Failure Of The Disability Definition In The Americans With Disabilities Act Of 1990, Lisa A. Eichhorn

Faculty Publications

The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") in 1990 has been praised as the major accomplishment of the disability rights movement. This statute, however, is not without its flaws. Perhaps the most problematic one is the way in which “disability” is defined. Lisa Eichhorn argues that the definition undercuts the effectiveness of the ADA. She begins with a historical look at society’s concepts of disability and discusses how these concepts were incorporated into the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the ADA. She then examines cases that have been dismissed because plaintiffs cannot prove disabled status, which illustrate the …

Ada Mediation After Sutton, Murphy And Albertson, James Levin

Faculty Publications

Judith Cohen's summary of the Interim ADA Mediation Standards in the last issue of The Journal of Alternative Dispute Resolution in Employment acknowledges the "skyrocketing" number of cases mediated under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). The United States Supreme Court's recent opinions in Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc., Murphy v. United Parcel Service, Inc., and Albertson, Inc. v. Kirkingberg surprised many in the disability community by explicitly excluding an individual from ADA coverage if she mitigates her mental or physical impairment and the impairment as mitigated no longer substantially limits a major life activity. Will the Supreme Court's narrowing …

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 …

The Supreme Court, 1997 Term -- Leading Cases -- Federal Statutes And Regulations -- Americans With Disabilities Act -- Asymptomatic Hiv, Peter Nicolas

Articles

No abstract provided.

"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 …

Reasonable Accommodations And Awkward Compromises: Issues Concerning Learning Disabled Students And Professional Schools In The Law School Context, Lisa A. Eichhorn

Faculty Publications

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, colleges and universities are prohibited from discriminating against qualified students with learning disabilities and must reasonably accommodate such disabilities so that students have a genuine opportunity to complete academic programs successfully. Not surprisingly, just like their non-disabled peers, a number of learning disabled college graduates are choosing to enter professions such as law and medicine. Their entry into professional schools has raised a number of legal issues concerning their qualification to matriculate, their need for accommodations, and their eventual ability to practice successfully. …

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 …

Working And Poor: The Increasingly Popular Practice Of Excluding Disabled Employees From Health Care Coverage, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

One might think, since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA),' that the employment story for disabled employees or would-be disabled employees was cheerful, or at least improving. This may be true in so far as obtaining and retaining employment is concerned;' however, the ADA, because it permits employers and third-party insurers to continue to utilize traditional risk management techniques, has resulted in reduced or (in some cases) non-existent employee benefits for the disabled. At the same time, more and more employers are opting to self-insure under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA),3 in …

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 …

The Americans With Disabilities Act And The Corpus Of Anti-Discrimination Law: A Force For Change In The Future Of Public Health Regulation, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this paper the author reviews the constitutional history of the courts' attempts to check the powers of the public health department. He demonstrates how ineffective and inconsistent constitutional review has been, and suggests that adequate review criteria have not emerged. The author shows that, whether the courts are applying First, Fourth, or Fourteenth Amendment standards, ultimately they are highly deferential to public health officials. Then he carefully examines the key concepts in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as they apply to communicable disease. He reveals Congress' clear intention to include communicable disease, even asymptomatic infection, as a disability. …