Law Commons^™

Severe Mental Illness And The Death Penalty: A Menu Of Legislative Options, Richard J. Bonnie

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2003, the American Bar Association established a Task Force on Mental Disability and the Death Penalty to further specify and implement the Supreme Court’s ruling banning execution of persons with intellectual disability and to consider an analogous ban against imposing the death penalty on defendants with severe mental disorders. The Task Force established formal links with the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the final report was approved by the ABA and the participating organizations in 2005 and 2006. This brief article focuses primarily on diminished responsibility at the time …

Supported Decision-Making And Merciful Health Care Access: Respecting Autonomy At End Of Life For Individuals With Cognitive Disabilities, Brenna M. Rosen

Washington and Lee Law Review

Supported decision-making is a relatively new, powerful, and quickly developing alternative to restrictive guardianships and other draconian surrogate decision-making arrangements for individuals with cognitive disabilities. Its power lies specifically in the protection and affirmation of their autonomy, allowing these individuals to remain central in the planning of their lives and affairs. Despite supported decision-making’s theoretical promise, it is often unclear whether and how the model interacts with other legislation presiding over how one may make crucial life choices, such as those at end of life.

This Note attempts to bridge the gap by analyzing how supported decision-making may be a …

Comment: The Project Of Freedom, Alexandra L. Klein

Washington and Lee Law Review

A person’s status may change over time and people should have the right to maximize their autonomy and learn and grow from their experiences. Legal structures must encourage autonomy and growth, rather than producing a static environment that prevents people from challenging external controls imposed upon their lives. Law can create legal structures that sustain an individual’s right to live according to their values. As Ms. Rosen writes, “[i]f an individual is capable of valuing, the wishes stemming from those values should dictate how the individual ought to be treated.” By protecting those values, Ms. Rosen’s Note advises us how …

Comment: Further Consideration On The Relationship Between The Americans With Disabilities Act, Supported Decision-Making, And Medical Aid In Dying, Amitai Heller

Washington and Lee Law Review

As Ms. Rosen’s Note explains in further detail, the use of supported decision-making creates an opportunity for persons with cognitive impairments to participate more fully in their end-of-life care. While this Comment focuses on the legal requirement for healthcare providers to serve people with cognitive impairments at the end of life, the tenets of patient autonomy, self-determination, and the dignity of risk must be integrated into end-of-life practice to provide guidance where legal requirements are absent or ambiguous. The use of the supported decision-making model in end-of-life care will only succeed when healthcare providers participate in an open-minded manner. It …

Weathering The Pandemic: Dying Old At A Young Age From Pre-Existing Racist Conditions, Arline T. Geronimus

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Mainstream social epidemiology now acknowledges the contributions of interpersonal racism, racialized stress, and implicit bias to population health inequity. It also increasingly recognizes that current and historical racist policies place barriers in the way of healthy lifestyles by institutionalizing food deserts, housing decay, and austerity urbanism. Essential as these developments are, they only skim the surface of how insidiously structural racism establishes and reproduces population health inequity. I coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of sustained cultural oppression upon the body. Weathering expands on the more conventional “social determinants of health” approach to understand the contextually fluctuating and …

Empathy’S Promise And Limits For Those Disproportionately Harmed By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Theresa Glennon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Structural race, ethnicity, and class disparities in the United States concentrated and intensified the health, economic, and psychological impact of COVID-19 for certain populations. Those same structural disparities and the belief system that maintains them may also account for the weak policy response that left the United States with high rates of infection and death, economic devastation of individuals, families, and small businesses, and psychological distress. A more equal society with a stronger pre-pandemic safety net may have prevented or eased the disproportionate hardship and avoided the drama and cliffhanging. Or the shock of a pandemic and likelihood of extreme …

Rationing In The Time Of Covid And The Perils Of Anti-Subordination Rhetoric, Mark Kelman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

With surges in COVID-19 cases threatening to overload some hospital facilities, we must face the possibility that therapeutic treatments will need to be rationed, at least in some places. I do not propose any particular ideal rationing scheme but caution strongly against adopting a position that Professor Bagenstos advocated this past spring, rejecting rationing on the basis of patient life expectancy simply because life expectancy based rationing might threaten the factual interests of those with disabilities and might conceivably be implemented by those making judgments that were not simply inaccurate but grounded in biased, unacceptably discriminatory intuitions that some decision …

A Failure To Rehabilitate: Leaving Disability Insurance Out Of The Mental Health Parity Debate, Christopher R. Wilson

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.