Speaking as someone who studies anxieties about malingering and their connections to health, disability, & social policy, the framing of this NYT article is enormously problematic.
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The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits nytimes.com/2021/07/21/mag…
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The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits nytimes.com/2021/07/21/mag…
The article is well-written, but it leaves out an enormous amount of context. Most importantly, ADA and disability law violations are de rigeur. They are common, frequent, every day occurrences. Ask people w/ mobility impairments how airlines handle their wheelchairs.
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Ask hearing-impaired or Deaf people about the availability of SL-fluent interpreters in public accommodations. And on and on and on. It's endless.
As w/ most forms of civil rights and antidiscrimination laws in the US, the rules are observed in the breach.
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As w/ most forms of civil rights and antidiscrimination laws in the US, the rules are observed in the breach.
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Beginning in early 1990s, federal courts issued decision after decision that essentially stripped the ADA of any real enforcement power. It got so bad that that notoriously progressive legislative body -- US Congress! -- had to step in in the late 2000s to restore some teeth.
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In addition to which, we want to think deeply about the staggering history of epistemic injustice against disabled people in the West in general. Suspicion, disbelief, and doubt about disabled people are baked into the very foundations of social policy in US in particular.
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(Watch this space for a @JLME_ASLME Symposium Issue that will explore this theme in wonderful detail). But our beliefs that disabled people are deceptive and are after personal enrichment are literally foundational to social policy in the US.
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NOT coincidentally at all, scope of that social policy is staggeringly thin & (Ethical Claim 🚨) utterly deficient in the US. There are important intersectional implications here as well when we consider the profound effects of structural racism in weakening social welfare.
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(Thus we had states in the US South opposing Medicare in the 1960s b/c they knew that the program would desegregate hospitals. They preferred everyone in their states live shorter, sicker lives than end segregation)
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We want to consider what @DorfmanDoron is writing and teaching us about what is termed the "fear of the disability con." It's rampant in the NYT article. To wit:
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Finally, we want to consider the role of public health litigation in filling the enormous policy vacuums left by our incredibly weak and insufficient social policy regime. In a better-designed system, we'd have robust social policies w/ staffing, resources, implementation
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& enforcement resources needed to create accessible spaces for people of all functionings & capacities (#UniversalDesign 🚨). B/c we have as a society abdicated these responsibilities, private actors are left to try & fill these civil rights gaps through tort liability.
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IMO, very few experts in #PHLaw believe that by design, we should have a system for promoting, protecting, and ensuring antidiscrimination and civil rights provisions that relies heavily on private actors using the tort liability system.
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Yet, as a society, we have virtually ensured its occurrence by closing off almost every superior policy avenue for growing and nurturing antidiscrimination and ensuring disabled people can access public resources and accommodations.
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Maybe it is unfair to ask the article to explain some or even any of this. But it's critical context that is missing. Without this background, the framing of the article imposes a crude dichotomy that does not adequately account for any of the structural forces that
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Impose such devastating costs on disabled people and make it so much harder for so many disabled people to live meaningful, flourishing lives in this country.
As ever in the US, we ignore structure and focus so much on the individual level.
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As ever in the US, we ignore structure and focus so much on the individual level.
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This isn't about the individual plaintiffs filing the lawsuits in these cases. This is really about much higher-level stigma against disabled people -- which is itself centuries old -- & structural forces that undermine attempts to relieve discrimination via social policy.
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#DisabilityLaw #PHLaw #PHEthx #Stigma #DisabilityStigma #WhatKindOfPeople #Bioethics #HealthLawRocks #HealthLAw #Antidiscrimination #CivilRightsLaw #DisStudies #DisHist #PolicyStudies #PHPolicy #LegalEpi
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