Disability Law Commons^™

The Intersection Between Disability And Lgbt Discrimination And Marginalization, Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Americans With Disabilities Act And Healthcare Employer-Mandated Vaccinations, Y. Tony Yang, Elizabeth Pendo, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

All Faculty Scholarship

Battles around workplace vaccination policies often focus on the annual influenza vaccine, but many healthcare employers impose requirements for additional vaccines because of the increased likelihood that employees in this sector will interact with populations at increased risk of acquiring or experiencing harmful sequelae of vaccine-preventable diseases. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many states recommend healthcare employees receive numerous vaccines, including measles, mumps, and rubella (“MMR”); tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (“Tdap”). However, recent outbreaks of once-eliminated diseases that are now resurgent and the rising antivaccination movement raise questions about how far employers can go to mandate …

The Role Of Law And Policy In Achieving Healthy People's Disability And Health Goals Around Access To Health Care, Activities Promoting Health And Wellness, Independent Living And Participation, And Collecting Data In The United States, Elizabeth Pendo, Lisa Iezzoni

All Faculty Scholarship

Ensuring that the almost 60 million Americans with disabilities live as healthy and independent lives as possible is an important goal for our nation. This evidence-based report highlights efforts to better use law and policy to support and protect people with disabilities. Specifically, it examines how existing federal laws and policies could be leveraged by states, communities, and other sectors to reduce barriers to primary and preventive care; reduce barriers to local health and wellness programs; increase access to leisure, social, or community activities (and indirectly, to religious activities) for individuals with disabilities; and generate better disability data needed to …

Ensuring The Reproductive Rights Of Women With Intellectual Disability, Nicole Agaronnik, Elizabeth Pendo, Tara Lagu, Christene Dejong, Aixa Perez-Caraballo, Lisa Iezzoni

All Faculty Scholarship

Background: Women with intellectual disability experience disparities in sexual and reproductive health care services.

Methods: To explore perceptions of caring for persons with disability, including individuals with intellectual disability, we conducted open-ended individual interviews with 20 practising physicians and three video-based focus group interviews with an additional 22 practising physicians, which reached data saturation. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. We used conventional content analysis methods to analyse transcripts.

Result: Physicians indicated that intellectual disability can pose challenges to providing sexual and reproductive health care. Observations coalesced around four themes: (1) communication; (2) routine preventive care; (3) contraception and sterilisation; and (4) …

Sex-Based Discrimination In Healthcare Under Section 1557: The New Final Rule And Supreme Court Developments, Brietta R. Clark, Elizabeth Pendo, Gabriella Garbero

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the primary goals of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has been the reduction and elimination of health disparities, generally defined as population-level health differences that adversely affect disadvantaged groups, including disparities associated with sex and gender. Many of PPACA’s general provisions — expanded access to public and private insurance coverage, guarantee issue and pricing reforms, and coverage mandates — were expected to reduce barriers and eliminate discriminatory practices targeting or disproportionately impacting women and transgender individuals. Provisions like the Women’s Health Amendment, which mandated women’s preventive healthcare to be covered without cost sharing, and the …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Covid-19 And Individuals With Developmental Disabilities: Tragic Realities And Cautious Hope, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast the United States, along with the rest of the world, into a time of crisis and uncertainty unlike any other in recent memory. Months into the pandemic, there is scant agreement among scientists, government officials, and large segments of the public, both domestic and abroad, as to determining the causes and workings of the virus, designing appropriate and effective responses to the outbreak, and constructing accurate assessments of the future—or even of the present. Indeed, the availability of concrete information about the virus and its effects is grossly inadequate and often replaced by anecdotal or …

Disability And Design, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

When scholars contemplate the legal tools available to policymakers for encouraging innovation, they primarily think about patents. If they are keeping up with the most recent literature, they may also consider grants, prizes, and taxes as means to increase the supply of innovation. But the innovation policy toolkit is substantially deeper than that. To demonstrate its depth, this Article explores the evolution of designs that help people with disabilities access the world around them. From artificial limbs to the modern wheelchair and the reshaping of the built environment, a variety of legal doctrines have influenced, for better and for worse, …

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake E. Reid

Publications

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 theoretical approach …

Medical Civil Rights As A Site Of Activism: A Reply To Critics, Craig Konnoth

Publications

See Craig Konnoth, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 1165 (2020).

See also Rabia Belt & Doron Dorfman, Response, Reweighing Medical Civil Rights, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 176 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/reweighing-medical-civil-rights/; Allison K. Hoffman, Response, How Medicalization of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, 72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 165 (2020), https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/how-medicalization-of-civil-rights-could-disappoint/.

Adverse Employment Actions In Failure-To-Accommodate Claims: Much Ado About Nothing, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

This Article addresses a circuit split in the disability law jurisprudence. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employees generally bring two types of claims against their employers—discrimination claims and failure-to-accommodate claims. Succeeding on a discrimination claim requires proving that the employee suffered an adverse employment action. Succeeding on a failure-to-accommodate claim does not. But several courts—including a recent case in the Tenth Circuit—have added this adverse-employment-action requirement into failure-to-accommodate claims. In doing so, these courts have camouflaged important issues about an employer’s obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation to disabled employees. Although I believe that courts that require an …

Virtual Access: A New Framework For Disability And Human Flourishing In An Online World, John D. Inazu, Johanna Smith

Scholarship@WashULaw

While many commentators have noted the wealth and class disparities that emerge from the digital divide, disability adds another important lens through which to consider questions of access and equity. Online accessibility for disabled people has fallen prey to the same assumptions and impediments that led to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) addressing disability access in the offline world. Addressing these shortcomings requires a significant conceptual shift in our understanding of “access,” even among disabled people. Offline, the sidewalk or doorway hindered access to those who needed assistance walking or moving. Today’s virtual sidewalks and doorways complicate access in …

The Promise And Peril Of Using Disability Law As A Tool For School Reform, Claire Raj

Washington Law Review

Advocates have recently devised a radical litigation approach to force broad systemic changes in public schools using the most unlikely of tools: disability law. If they succeed, disability law stands to eclipse any other cause of action as the most effective means of school reform. This novel approach relies on groundbreaking research demonstrating a correlation between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that children encounter outside school and the learning challenges they face in school. Focusing on this link, advocates claim that children from impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, by virtue of where they live, have disabilities that entitle them to system-wide school …

The Daily Work Of Fitting In As A Marginalized Lawyer, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite increased public dialogue about the need for inclusion, marginalized lawyers adjust their behaviour to “fit” in their legal workplaces. In this article, the author presents the results of interviews with lawyers in Canada who self-identify as belonging to a marginalized group based on race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender or sexual identity, working-class background, and/or disability. Based on these interviews, the author advances a taxonomy of the five strategies employed by these lawyers to fit in to their workplaces: covering strategies, compensating strategies, mythologizing strategies, passing strategies, and exiting strategies. Marginalized lawyers employ covering strategies, which may be appearance-, affiliation-, advocacy-, …

Knowledge And Desires Of Parents Of Middle School Students With Intellectual Disability Regarding Inclusive Education Laws And Practices In South Korea: Qualitative Case Study, Yunji Jeong

Special Education ETDs

The purpose of this study was to examine the knowledge and desires of parents of middle school students with ID regarding inclusive education practices and laws in South Korea. I interviewed seven mothers of children with ID who attended South Korean middle school. Three themes emerged including (a) mother-teacher communication, (b) particular knowledge that suppressed further desires for inclusive education, and (c) culture-based advocacy for inclusive education. I discussed these findings based on Confucianism, collectivism, social and medical models of disability, and Rawls’s theory of justice. The mothers neither knew about inclusive education laws nor valued the laws. Instead, they …

Unfit To Be Seen: Customer Preferences And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Craig Westergard

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

Resources For Special Education Advocacy, Virginia A. Neisler

Law Librarian Scholarship

The CDC reports that approximately 1 in 6 children in the United States has a developmental disability.1 Certain types of developmental disabilities are becoming rapidly more prevalent, with autism spectrum disorder affecting 1 in 59 children in 2014 (as compared to 1 in 150 as recently as 2002).2 From 1997 to 2008, all incidences of developmental disabilities in children in the United States increased in prevalence by more than 17 percent.3 This represents a significant part of our population and in recent decades has given rise to a complex system of legal rights and protections for developmentally disabled children that …

Thinking Outside The Checkbox: Examining The Benefits Of Depression In The Workplace, Tyler L. Jensen

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Don't Say Depression: Specific Diagnosable Injuries Under The Washington Law Againt Discrimination's Privilege Statute, Jack Miller

Washington Law Review

In 2018, the Washington State Legislature amended the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD) to prevent automatic waivers of physician- and psychologist-patient privileges when plaintiffs claim non-economic, emotional distress damages. This legislation appears to be in response to the Washington Court of Appeals’ decision Lodis v. Corbis Holding, Inc.,which held that a plaintiff waives their patient- and psychologist-privilege merely by alleging emotional distress damages. The new law, RCW 49.60.510, prevents waiver unless the plaintiff alleges a specific diagnosable injury, relies on the testimony of a healthcare or psychiatric expert, or claims a “failure to accommodate a disability or discrimination on …

Texas, The Death Penalty, And Intellectual Disability, Megan Green

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming