Recent ucladlj items

A Tale as Old as Time: Ableism and Immigration

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper will explore the history of ableism in immigration, grounds of inadmissibility that affect disabled immigrants with a specific focus on public charge, and other obstacles faced by disabled immigrants, all while emphasizing that eugenics is still ongoing and perpetuated through the American immigration system.

I am both disabled and an immigrant, so this paper is personal. However, I became disabled after immigrating and therefore did not have to navigate the process with a disability. The American immigration system is broken and was designed to exclude disabled immigrants. This is contradictory to the supposed American ideal of welcoming everyone, including the tired, poor and huddled masses mentioned on the Statue of Liberty. The United States needs a major restructure creating a system more aligned with the social model of disability, which would recognize that there is nothing inherent about disability that leads to disabled people becoming a public charge;...

Front Matter

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter

Key Disability Rights Regulations Will Remain Authoritative in the Wake of Loper Bright: A Toolkit for Litigation

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay will explain why the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—overruling the deference afforded regulatory interpretation in the Court’s well-established decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council—should not threaten a core of longstanding disability rights regulations. My goal is to provide a useful resource for litigators facing arguments challenging those regulations in the wake of Loper Bright.

The ADA Applies to Police Interrogations: A Framework for Accommodating and Protecting Accused Disabled People

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Supreme Court of the United States continues to chip away at the protections afforded to factually and legally innocent incarcerated individuals. It is more important than every to modify the way we police to ensure the innocent never get there in the first place. This Comment argues that because disabled people are highly susceptible to coercive police tactics and disproportionately likely to falsely confess or say things that can be used against them when taken out of context, we must revisit the way we interrogate disabled people as the United States reimagines the way it polices. Specifically, Section II of this Comment examines the ADA's applicability to law enforcement and the constitutionally protected rights to which individuals are entitled during interrogations. It futher analyzes the ways in which disabled people are disproportionately harmed by commonly used coercive police tactics and, consequently, more likely to falsely confess. Section II illustrates these...

In Whose Best Interests? Finding a Role for Student Voice in the Development of IEPs

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Although IEPs are meant to serve students’ best interests, student feedback is rarely incorporated into their development. This lack of student voice would not pose a problem if IEP teams were consistently providing students with plans that appropriately served their needs. However, existing research indicates that this is not always the case. In this note, I argue that IEP teams often struggle to (1) balance necessary accommodations with minimally restrictive learning environments, (2) incentivize student investment in education, and (3) assess mental and emotional disabilities that present more limited physical manifestations. Furthermore, my research indicates that increased opportunities to share student voice in IEP meetings can at least partially remedy these deficiencies.

In Part I of this note, I examine students’ rights in the context of IEP law. I begin by outlining the basic legal requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). I then...

Front Matter

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter

To Be Loved or to Be Healthy: A Disabled Individual's Conundrum of Choosing Between Marrying Someone They Love or Continuing to Receive the Health Resources They Need

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Eligibility for Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid is essential for individuals with physical, developmental, intellectual, and other disabilities because it provides access to habilitative care. Habilitative care provides services necessary to maintain a base-level quality of life and facilitates independent living. Some of the benefits provided to disabled individuals through habilitative care are in-home assistance, job support, and adaptive equipment. Unfortunately, for many disabled individuals, the choice of marriage disqualifies them from receiving the benefits they need to live independently with in-home assistance and support. This disqualification from governmental services is referred to as “the marriage penalty.” This marriage penalty forces many disabled individuals to either opt out of marriage or lose their benefits. This limitation can be changed. This note will suggest the exclusion of spousal income for determination of services, passing the SSI Restoration...

The IDEA in Prison: An Impossible Mandate?

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Up to 85 percent of youth in prison have a qualifying disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”). Yet only onethird receive some form of special education services in prison, and the services provided are inadequate. The failure of prisons to comply with the IDEA is due to the carceral system’s inherent institutional and restrictive nature, which makes it impossible to comply with the IDEA’s requirements for individualization and inclusion. As a solution, this Note suggests Congress should amend the IDEA to (1) remove the loopholes that have made prisons a purportedly appropriate setting for special education and (2) extend the IDEA’s child assessment and manifestation determination requirements to criminal and delinquency proceedings. This solution would ensure that no youth with disabilities are sent to prison where they cannot receive the mandated services they need, and instead ensure they receive these services in the least restrictive environment...

How #FreeBritney Exposes the Need to Disable the Model Rules of Professional Conduct

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The legal community has been instrumental in guaranteeing fundamental rights of self-determination for some disabled people. However, lawyers are often complicit in ableist practices—in fact, our ethical rules sometimes require it. Rule 1.14 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (“Model Rules”) provides that lawyers may supplement their own judgment for a disabled client’s when they think it is in their client’s interest. In Britney Spears’s case, her former attorney repeatedly undermined her attempts to end her conservatorship, likely based on his mistaken belief that doing so would not be in the singer’s best interest. Indeed, her attorney did not even inform her that ending her conservatorship was an option.

This paper considers the ethical obligations of attorneys when interacting with disabled clients, arguing that the Model Rules should be altered to reflect the idea of “support-based” legal capacity embedded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights...

Suspicious Species

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Service dogs and emotional support animals provide crucial assistance to people with disabilities in many areas of life. As the number of these assistance animals continues to grow, however, so does public suspicion about abuse of law and faking the need for such accommodations. Legislators have been directly reactive to this moral panic, and the majority of states have passed laws to combat the misrepresentation of pets as assistance animals. Consequently, people with disabilities who use service dogs feel the need to signal compliance to avoid harassment, questioning, or exclusion from spaces that do not allow pets. Taking an empirical law and psychology approach, this Article concerns itself with the possible sources of the phenomenon of misrepresentation, which I term “assistance-animal disability con.” The Article also discusses the stigmatizing consequences of the suspicion surrounding faking the need to use assistance animals for the disability community. The Article shows that...

Substantively Immaterial? How the IDEA Enables Special Education Labels to be Used as Tools of Inequity

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The IDEA’s highly individualized process of disability identification and IEP development allows families with greater financial resources and more cultural capital to secure more advantageous labels for their children—and consequently to reap the benefits of individualized services. At the same time, such insistence on individualization leaves students who receive disadvantageous labels without legal recourse. If plaintiffs claim that they have been identified under an inappropriate disability label, they face an uphill battle: even if they do successfully file a mislabeling complaint, the same financial, informational, or social disadvantages that kept them from securing a more advantageous label in the first place may again hinder their legal claim. In pressing their claim, plaintiffs face courts that sever these labels from their social meanings and fail to consider the broader context of disproportionality surrounding their claims. Ultimately, mislabeling claims demonstrate...

Disability Without Documentation

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Disability exists regardless of whether a doctor has confirmed its existence. Yet in the American workplace, employees are not disabled, or entitled to reasonable accommodations, until a doctor says so. This Article challenges the assumption that requests for reasonable accommodations must be supported by medical proof of disability. It proposes an accommodation process that accepts individuals’ assessments of their disabilities and defers to their accommodation preferences. A documentation-free model is not alien to employment law. In evaluating religious accommodations, employers—and courts—take a hands-off approach to employees’ representations that their religious beliefs are sincere. Disability deserves the same deference. This Article also contributes a novel analysis of agency guidance by exploring how its support of medical documentation requirements conflicts with legislative intent and the Americans with Disabilities Act’s rejection of the medical model of disability.

Documenting...

Pandemic Eugenics: Discrimination, Disability, & Detention During COVID-19

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The hidden blueprint of eugenics continues to shape the treatment of captive and vulnerable populations throughout the current pandemic. Though nominally discredited, eugenic thinking continues to guide our twenty-first century incarceration policies and our discriminatory treatment of detained, disabled, and neglected populations. During COVID-19, our unrecognized reliance on eugenics has caused a cascade of disasters: disregard for the welfare of incarcerated people who have fought COVID-19 without supplies, social distancing ability, or compassionate release; hospital rationing policies which limit use of ventilators, hospital beds, and other medical devices by disabled and elderly individuals; the skyrocketing death toll in nursing and long-term care homes; and the profound neglect of group home residents, including children in foster care and the cognitively and developmentally disabled.

These inequitable practices follow a pattern consistent with the philosophy...

Screened Out Onscreen: Disability Discrimination, Hiring Bias, and Artificial Intelligence

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This Article explores how Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 interact with artificial intelligence (AI) and employment bias and discrimination against and for people with disabilities. Under these sections, employers are prohibited from discrimination on the basis of disability in the hiring and employment process, yet technology that screens video interviews, applications, and other employee and prospective employee materials demonstrates bias and does not select disabled job candidates. These biases can run afoul of the ADA and raise ethical concerns. People with disabilities face disproportionately high unemployment rates compared to the general population. Technology often improves lives and access to opportunity, but AI has the potential to disrupt gains and progress made to improve the lives of disabled individuals.

Part I of this Article analyzes AI and its relation to the disability...

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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From Carrie Buck to Britney Spears: Strategies for Disrupting the Ongoing Reproductive Oppression of Disabled People

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In June 2021, Britney Spears made headlines when she testified to a judge that she was being prevented from having children because her conservator would not allow her to stop using contraception. Britney Spears’s dreadful experiences are a glaring reminder that nearly 100 years after the infamous Buck v. Bell decision, reproduction is still weaponized to subjugate people with disabilities. Indeed, the reproductive oppression experienced by Britney Spears and other people with actual or perceived disabilities is deeply entrenched in our laws, in our policies, and in our collective conscience. Confronting these persistent inequities will require us to radically transform our laws and policies. This Essay responds to the ongoing reproductive injustice experienced by disabled people by proposing a vision to assist activists, legal professionals, scholars, and policymakers conceive of and articulate the basic contours of a paradigm shift that supports the coalescence of the reproductive...

Front Matter

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter

Poverty, Welfare Reform, and the Meaning of Disability

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The coincidence of poverty and disability has been widely acknowledged. The focus has been on the degree to which individuals with mental and physical disabilities face poverty because of their exclusion from the labor market and societal discrimination. There has been less concern, however, with the degree to which disability and illness are distributed in ways that reflect gender, racial, and economic inequalities.

Historically, poverty and disability have been addressed by separate governmental agencies and social assistance programs. With minor exceptions, disability has been addressed through programs structured on a social insurance model while poverty has been dealt with by a means-tested public-assistance model. The nature and mode of assistance provided through both models reinforce a social and economic system in which the ideal citizen is a male engaged in waged work that provides sufficient income for family support and who is without responsibility for...

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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Front Matter

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter

Disability Rights on Tribal Reservations

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a statute that is largely silent regarding its application on tribal reservations. According to the traditional rules of federal Indian law, Congress must explicitly abrogate tribal sovereignty in order for a statute to be applicable on reservations. However, the Eleventh Circuit has applied the Tuscarora doctrine of the presumption of general applicability, overruling the federal Indian common law rule of explicit abrogation, and found that Title III of the ADA is applicable on tribal reservations. This paper argues that the Tuscarora doctrine is only good law because of the discriminatory backdrop against which native status has been designed and perpetuated. This paper uses two case studies to argue that the forceful application of the ADA on reservations is not the appropriate tool to ensure that tribes protect their members with disabilities. Instead, tribes must be financially empowered to continue to provide culturally appropriate...

The Aesthetics of Disability

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The foundational faith of disability law is the proposition that we can reduce disability discrimination if we can foster interactions between disabled and nondisabled people. This central faith, which is rooted in contact theory, has encouraged integration of people with and without disabilities, with the expectation that contact will reduce prejudicial attitudes and shift societal norms. However, neither the scholarship nor disability law sufficiently accounts for what this Article calls the “aesthetics of disability,” the proposition that our interaction with disability is mediated by an affective process that inclines us to like, dislike, be attracted to, or be repulsed by others on the basis of their appearance. The aesthetics literature introduces a significant complication to uncritical reliance on contact as the theoretical and remedial basis for our inclusive ideal. Contact and engagement with the aesthetics of disability may fail to provide the benefits...

[Un]Usual Suspects: Deservingness, Scarcity, and Disability Rights

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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 or questioned about their identity when using their rights. As a group, disabled people are forced to navigate new defensive policies that seek to address widely held perceptions of fakery and abuse. This Article uses a series of survey experiments conducted with multiple nationally representative samples totaling more than 3200 Americans along with forty-seven qualitative...

Contemporary Voting Rights Controversies Through the Lens of Disability

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

People with disabilities are the ticking time bomb of the electorate. An estimated thirty to thirty-five percent of all voters in the next twenty-five years will need some form of accommodation. Despite the significant and growing population of voters with disabilities, they do not vote in proportion to their numbers. We can consider voters with disabilities as “the canaries in the coal mine,” the people who are an advance warning of the structural difficulties in voting not just for themselves, but also for the system as a whole. Solving problems in voting for people with disabilities will strengthen the entire system and will help improve the voting process for everyone, especially people from disempowered communities. Furthermore, although election law scholars have largely ignored the unique voting problems confronting voters with disabilities, virtually every major voting controversy in contemporary American electoral politics directly implicates issues of disability.

This...

Fri, 1 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race and Mental Status

Fri, 1 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While it might be expected that the mentallly ill are treated simlarly throughout the criminal justice system irrespective of race, the cases I have reviewed suggest otherwise. By focusing on the triage function performed by police in their street-level encounters, this project provides insight into the intersecting factors at work in police encounters with the mentally ill.

Ultimately, this Article calls for renewed attention to the ways in which police exercise their discretion, as it appears that they do so in markedly different ways depending upon the race of the person deemed mentally ill.

In the Child's Best Interests? Rethinking Consideration of Physical Disability in Child Custody Disputes