Disability Law Commons^™

Data Note: What Are The Employment Experiences Of Youth With Autism After High School?, Alberto Migliore, Agnieszka Zalewska

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

As the number of youth diagnosed with autism increases across the nation, there is a growing interest in knowing about their employment experiences after high school. To explore this, we examined the findings from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2.

As Table 1 shows, over half of youth with autism worked at some point after leaving high school (67%). This figure was greater than for their peers with an intellectual disability (ID) (53%), although smaller compared with their peers with other disabilities (86%). When looking only at those employed at the time of the interview, however, the figures were smaller across …

Data Note: Growth In Community-Based Non-Work, Jean Winsor, John Butterworth

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

Understanding the role of community-based non-work (CBNW) services is complex. While different data sources suggest different levels of investment, there is consistent evidence that the service is being used more frequently. The number of states reporting that they provide CBNW services on the IDD Agency Survey grew from 18 in FY1996 to 30 in FY2010. Nationally, the reported participation in CBNW services has grown steadily for states that report it as a service, from 18.7% in FY1999 to 47% in FY2010.

CBNW services also accounted for 57.7% of state IDD (Intellectual and Developmental Disability) agency expenditures for FY2010, for states …

Data Note: Prevalence Of Youth With Autism Who Received Vocational Rehabilitation Services, Alberto Migliore, Agnieszka Zalewska

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

In 2002, about six children aged eight years per every 1000 people in the general population received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The corresponding figure in 2008 was about 11 children, a 78% increase in just six years¹.

To better understand how the increasing population of people with autism may impact adult programs, we examined the number of youth with autism served by state vocational rehabilitation programs in 2010. To account for the states' general population sizes, we reported the number of youth with autism served per 100,000 in the state general population (prevalence).

As Figure …

Data Note: Vocational Rehabilitation Employment Outcomes For Transition-Age Youth With Intellectual Disabilities, Agnieszka Zalewska, Jennifer Sullivan Sulewski

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

As transition services evolve, increased attention is being given to the outcomes of transition-age youth. Since different age groups have different employment support needs and unique circumstances, it is crucial to monitor their outcomes separately and to address their services in a customized manner. This Data Note will focus on employment outcomes of transition-age youth with intellectual disabilities (ID) as compared with older age groups of people with ID. In this analysis, transition-age youth with ID are divided into two groups: ages 16–21 and ages 22–30. They are then compared to all other working-age adults.

Nationally, the percentage of closures …

The London Paralympis Games 'Inspire A Generation' And Spark Abortion Controversy, Emily Hardy

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Persons Affected By Traumatic Brain Injury In The Workplace; Implications For Employee Assistance Programs, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

Employee Assistance Programs often provide behavioral health services to employees. The article discusses issues related to employees affected by traumatic brain injury such as psychosocial challenges that may accompany reentry into the workplace. Strategies that employers may utilize to accommodate such challenges are presented. Implications for practitioners are explored within the context of the Americans with Disabilities Act, disability management, and human resources.

Seeing A Future For Accessible Reading Materials: The Wipo Treaty For The Visually Disabled, Marjorie Kennedy

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Pregnancy As 'Disability' And The Amended Americans With Disabilities Act, Jeannette Cox

School of Law Faculty Publications

The recent expansion of the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) protected class invites reexamination of the assumption that pregnant workers may not use the ADA to obtain workplace accommodations. The ADA’s scope now includes persons with minor temporary physical limitations comparable to pregnancy’s physical effects. Accordingly, the primary remaining justification for concluding that pregnant workers may not obtain ADA accommodations is that pregnancy is a physically healthy condition rather than a physiological defect. Drawing on the social model of disability, this Article challenges the assumption that medical diagnosis of “defect” must be a prerequisite to disability accommodation eligibility. The social …

Overcoming Our Global Disability In The Workforce: Mediating The Dream, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

The unparalleled global support for the 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") highlights the global schism between the public extolling of human rights for individuals with disabilities and the private castigating of such individuals in their daily lives and in the workforce. The CRPD explicitly mandates that work is a right accorded to individuals with disabilities, and global employers are now being challenged to implement that right. Yet, in order to ensure meaningful, universal compliance with its directives, the CRPD imposes affirmative duties on Supporting States to develop a customized, workable plan that effectively …

Preventing Sex-Offender Recidivism Through Therapeutic Jurisprudence Approaches And Specialized Community Integration, Heather Cucolo, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The public’s panic about the fear of recidivism if adjudicated sex offenders are ever to be released to the community has not subsided, despite the growing amount of information and statistically-reliable data signifying a generally low risk of re-offense. The established case law upholding sex offender civil commitment and containment statutes has rejected challenges of unconstitutionality, and continues to be dominated by punitive undertones. We have come to learn that the tools used to assess offenders for risk and civil commitment are often inaccurate and that meaningful treatment for this population is often unavailable and ineffective. Yet, society continues to …

A Female Disease: The Unintentional Gendering Of Fibromyalgia Social Security Claims, Dara Purvis

Faculty Scholarship

Social Security disability claims are not supposed to be decided based on the gender of the applicant. Reliance on the apparently neutral mechanism of clinical medical evidence, however, has a disproportionate impact on women bringing disability claims based on fibromyalgia. Recognizing and identifying disability has been delegated by Congress and the Social Security Administration almost entirely to physicians, based upon a misguided and mistaken belief that clinical medical evidence evaluated by a trained physician will answer with certainty whether an individual claimant is capable of working. Fibromyalgia, a diffuse syndrome characterized by excess pain that is overwhelmingly diagnosed in women …

The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: Beginning To Examine The Implications For Canadian Lawyers' Professional Responsiblities, H Archibald Kaiser

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereafter the CRPD or the Convention) should herald a new epoch in the way persons with disabilities are treated throughout the world community. The entire panoply of ramifications of this Convention, the purpose of which is “to promote, protect and ensure the full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity”, (Article 1) is as yet unascertainable. However, States Parties must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by any person, organization or private enterprise” (Article …

Implementing Legal Capacity Under Article 12 Of The Un Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: The Difficult Road From Guardianship To Supported Decision-Making, Robert Dinerstein

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

A Call For Standards: An Overview Of The Current Status And Need For Guardian Standards Of Conduct And Codes Of Ethics, Karen E. Boxx, Terry W. Hammond

Articles

The role of trust in guardianships is rarely discussed, perhaps because of the assumption that court supervision of guardians reduces their power to act in any way other than trustworthy. However, as the number of persons needing guardianship protection increases while the resources available to courts to finance supervision decreases, the role of guardian is starting to become a more conventional fiduciary relationship complete with a hallmark downside-lack of supervision. Because of this trend, the concept of delineated standards for performance of a guardian's duties has taken on critical importance.

The 2001 Wingspan Conference, the second national conference on guardianship …

Confine Is Fine: Have The Non-Dangerous Mentally Ill Lost Their Right To Liberty? An Empirical Study To Unravel The Psychiatrist’S Crystal Ball, Donald H. Stone

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article will examine the reverse trend in civil commitment laws in the wake of recent tragedies and discuss the effect of broader civil commitment standards on the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, and the 2012 Aurora movie theatre shooting have spurred fierce debates about the dangerousness of mentally ill and serve as cautionary tale about what happens when warning signs go unnoticed and opportunities for early intervention missed. This piece will explore the misconception about the role medication and inpatient civil commitments should play in prevention …

Impairment As Protected Status: A New Universality For Disability Rights, Michelle A. Travis

Georgia Law Review

This Article analyzes the fundamental change to federal
civil rights law that Congress accomplished through the
ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (the ADAAA). Congress
enacted the ADAAA in response to a series of United States
Supreme Court opinions that had narrowly interpreted the
definition of disability in the Americans with Disabilities
Act of 1990. Although many commentators have
recognized the ADAAA's intent to restore the class of
individuals with disabilities to the breadth that Congress
originally intended, this Article argues that the ADAAA
accomplished something more significant: it extricated
disability from the broader concept of impairment. As a
result, the …

Framing Disability, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Mainstream attitudes toward disability lag behind U.S. law. This tension between attitudes and law reflects a wider gap between the ideas about disability pervasive in mainstream society — what this Article calls the "outside" view — and the ideas about disability common within the disability community — what this Article calls the "inside" view. The outside perspective tends to misunderstand and mischaracterize aspects of the experience, theory, and law of disability.

The law can help to close this gap in attitudes by changing the conditions in which attitudes are formed or reinforced. Thus, this Article proposes using framing rules to …

The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Two conflicting stories have consumed the academic debate regarding the impact of deinstitutionalization litigation. The first, which has risen almost to the level of conventional wisdom, is that deinstitutionalization was a disaster. The second story challenges the suggestion that deinstitutionalization has uniformly been unsuccessful, as well as the causal link critics seek to draw with the growth of the homeless population. This Article, which embraces the second story, assesses the current wave of deinstitutionalization litigation. It contends that things will be different this time. The particular outcomes of the first wave of deinstitutionalization litigation, this Article contends, resulted from the …

Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law And The Ada Amendments Act, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This is a crucial juncture for U.S. disability law. In 2008, Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which aims to reverse the courts’ narrowing interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This legislative intervention provides an important lens through which to consider attitudes toward disability, both because the success of the ADAAA will depend on judicial attitudes, and because the changes rendered by the ADAAA shed light on pervasive societal attitudes. This Essay makes three main points. First, the ADAAA intervenes in the developing doctrine on disability discrimination in important ways; in so doing, however, the ADAAA …

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …