Disability Law Commons^™

Digital Accessibility In The Hospitality And Tourism Industry: Legal And Ethical Considerations, Debra D. Burke, Kenneth J. Sanney, Dan Clapper

William & Mary Business Law Review

Federal law requires accessibility for public sector websites. What about the web pages and apps of hotels, restaurants, and tourism providers? The Americans with Disabilities Act may cover private sector websites if they are considered a place of public accommodation, but the law is unclear. This Article will provide an overview of the legal responsibilities of operators to provide accessibility to persons with disabilities, discuss the World Wide Web Consortium’s guidelines for web accessibility, and argue that the hospitality and tourism industry has a unique ethical obligation to fill in the gap where the legal system has failed this ...

Disability Rights And The Discourse Of Justice, Samuel R. Bagenstos

SMU Law Review Forum

Although the ADA has changed the built architecture of America and dramatically increased the visibility of disabled people, it has not meaningfully increased disability employment rates. And the statute continues to provoke a backlash. Disability rights advocates and sympathizers offer two principal stories to explain this state of affairs. One, the “lost-bipartisanship” story, asserts that disability rights were once an enterprise broadly endorsed across the political spectrum but that they have fallen prey to the massive rise in partisan polarization in the United States. The other, the “legal-change-outpacing-social-change” story, asserts that the ADA was essentially adopted too soon—that the ...

Mediation In Education For Foster Care, Anelise Powers

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

There are well over 400,000 children in foster care. Education can improve the well-being of foster children in critical development stages of life and support their economic success in adulthood. In recent years, the law has given greater priority to the education of foster children, and foster children are often eligible for additional services. However, a common trend in foster care research is that foster children, though eligible, do not always receive the services created to assist them. This paper will explore how improving mediation related to education and foster care can help maximize the impact of efforts to ...

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake Reid

Indiana Law Journal

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive ...

The Blind Leading The Deaf: An Investigation Of The Inconsistent Accommodations The Justice System Provides To People Who Are Deaf, Elizabeth Pindilli

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

Historically, and to this day, people with disabilities have not been considered capable of determining their own needs. Instead, the general population has taken it upon themselves to dictate what accommodations they shall receive. This becomes particularly problematic for the deaf community when interacting with the criminal justice system, where a lack of communication is synonymous with a lack of justice. In this situation, the state should defer to the individual’s understanding of their needs, or carry the burden of proving that another accommodation is equally effective.

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 ...

Recognizing The Need For Mental Health Reform In The Texas Department Of Criminal Justice, Kara Mchorse

St. Mary's Law Journal

The ways in which mental health care and the criminal justice system interact are in desperate need of reform in Texas. The rate of mental illness in Texas is higher than the current state of mental health care can provide for. While state hospitals were once the primary care facilities of those with mental illness, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has taken on that role in the last few decades; and when the criminal justice system becomes entangled with mental health care, it often leads to “unmitigated disaster.” If Texas continues to allow the TDCJ to act as ...

Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records ...

Disability Rights And The Discourse Of Justice., Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

Although the ADA has changed the built architecture of America and dramatically increased the visibility of disabled people, it has not meaningfully increased disability employment rates. And the statute continues to provoke a backlash. Disability rights advocates and sympathizers offer two principal stories to explain this state of affairs. One, the “lost-bipartisanship” story, asserts that disability rights were once an enterprise broadly endorsed across the political spectrum but that they have fallen prey to the massive rise in partisan polarization in the United States. The other, the “legal-change-outpacing-social- change” story, asserts that the ADA was essentially adopted too soon—that ...

Disabling Language: Why Legal Terminology Should Comport With A Social Model Of Disability, Meg E. Ziegler

Boston College Law Review

The disability terminology used in the law has evolved significantly over time. This evolution has mirrored various models for treating and perceiving disability in society, from the moral model of disability as a sin to the medical model of disability as a defect to be cured. After witnessing the success of the Civil Rights Movement, disability rights activists began to push for a social model of disability that reframed disability as a condition created by physical and cultural barriers to inclusion rather than as an individual impairment. This activism led to federal legislation mandating both inclusion and inclusive language, but ...

Conditional Parentage Is The New Eugenics, Dr. Yael Efron, Dr. Pnina Lifshitz-Aviram

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Baker Act: Time For Florida To Get Its Act Together, Alexander Lemieux

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Gray Area: The Scope Of Title Ii Of The Ada’S Applicability To Ad Hoc Police Encounters, Michelle Kain

Boston College Law Review

On February 22, 2019, in Gray v. Cummings, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit considered whether, and to what extent, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to police encounters, including arrests. Recognizing that courts disagree on the point during an arrest at which Title II begins to apply, the First Circuit declined to enter the debate, assuming instead that Title II applied to the police encounter at hand for the purpose of adjudicating the claim on narrower grounds. This Comment argues that the next time the question of Title II’s applicability ...

[Un]Usual Suspects: Deservingness, Scarcity, And Disability Rights, Doron Dorfman

UC Irvine Law Review

People encounter disability in public spaces where accommodations are granted to those who fit into this protected legal class. Nondisabled people desire many of these accommodations—such as the use of reserved parking spots or the ability to avoid waiting in a queue—and perceive them as “special rights” prone to abuse. This apprehension about the exploitation of rights by those pretending to be disabled, which I refer to as “fear of the disability con,” erodes trust in disability law and affects people with disabilities both on an individual level and a group level. Individuals with disabilities are often harassed ...

Pups, Paperwork, And Process: Confusion And Conflict Regarding Serviceand Assistance Animals Under Federal Law, Rebecca J. Huss

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article recaps my symposium presentation, where I argue that feminist organizing strategies are central to healing our society and creating restorative justice from my perspective as a survivor of occupational injury, battering, and criminalization for self-defense. This includes the creation of Free Battered Texas Women. We prefer to think of ourselves as survivor-advocates who use a variety of tactics to empower ourselves, incarcerated battered women, and citizens. These strategies include pedagogy; poetry and other written forms; art; and legislative advocacy. I blend this grassroots activism with feminist disability theory, radical feminist theory, feminist ethnography, and feminist criminology.

Endrew's Impact On Twice-Exceptional Students, Catherine A. Bell

William & Mary Law Review

Approximately 2 to 5 percent of the American student population qualifies as both gifted and learning disabled. These students, labeled by educators as “twice-exceptional,” generally demonstrate superior cognitive ability, yet also present profound weaknesses in seemingly basic skills. This disconnect in twice-exceptional students’ abilities produces great difficulties for America’s public schools.

Twice-exceptional students, as a result of their disability, can generally qualify for special education services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEIA). Once a student qualifies for services under the IDEIA, he is entitled to receive a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE ...

The Captive Lab Rat: Human Medical Experimentation In The Carceral State, Laura I. Appleman

Boston College Law Review

Human medical experimentation upon captive, vulnerable subjects is not a relic of our American past. It is part of our present. The extensive history of medical experimentation on the disabled, the poor, the mentally ill, and the incarcerated has been little explored. Its continuance has been even less discussed, especially in the legal literature. The standard narrative of human medical experimentation ends abruptly in the 1970s, with the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis study. My research shows, however, that this narrative is incorrect and incomplete. The practice of experimenting on the captive and vulnerable persists. Our current approach to human ...

Land Of The Free (Appropriate Public Education), Home Of The Deprived: How Vocational Services Can Remedy Education Deprivations For Former Students With Disabilities, Maria N. Liberopoulos

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note explores the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s requirement that all children between the ages of three and twenty-one are provided a free and appropriate public education. This Note focuses on the relief available for students who are either older than twenty-one or who received a high school diploma, but who did not receive a free and appropriate public education. After delving into the remedy of compensatory education, this Note proposes the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services of the Department of Education promulgate a new regulation that includes vocational training and services as a specific remedy ...

Online Businesses Beware: Ada Lawsuits Demand Website Accessibility For Blind Plaintiffs, Ricardo Alvarado

Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.