Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Bridging The Physical-Mental Gap: An Empirical Look At The Impact Of Mental Illness Stigma On Ada Outcomes, Wendy Hensel, Gregory Jones

Wendy F. Hensel

A plaintiff who seeks redress for disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act must first show that he or she is "disabled" within the meaning of the statute. There is no question that all plaintiffs have experienced difficulty in making this showing as a result of several Supreme Court decisions narrowing the definition of "disability."Many scholars have argued that courts do not appreciate the social construction of disability and focus too much attention on medical diagnoses and functional limitations rather than the impact of societal attitudes and prejudices. Some scholars have gone further, however, to theorize that individuals alleging …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …