Last February, we noted that several legal historians would be participating in a University of Pennsylvania Law Review symposium on "The Disability Frame." The published volume is now available online at the Law Review's website. Contributions of interest for readers of this blog include:
Nate Holdren (Drake University), Capitalism Disables: The Case of Workers' Compensation Laws. Abstract:
This article presents an account of disability as social and thus variable, connected to an account of capitalism as an inherently disabling type of society, such that different capitalist societies may disable in different ways, but all of them will disable. The article then takes the early history of workers’ compensation laws in the United States as a case study for the theoretical account of disability and capitalism, arguing that those laws created new incentives for discrimination against disabled people and thus re-organized the process of disabling. The article concludes with brief speculation about what these points imply for the prospects of achieving justice for disabled people through law.
Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania), Disability Benefits as Poverty Law: Revisiting the "Disabled State". Abstract:
This essay, a contribution to "The Disability Frame" symposium, uses the history of a famous and influential disability benefits case to revisit political scientist Deborah Stone’s argument in THE DISABLED STATE (1984). Observing that “[m]edical certification” of disability had “become one of the major paths to public aid in the modern welfare state,” Stone wondered whether policymakers were asking the “concept of disability” to do too much and whether they were sufficiently alert to the concept’s tendency to expand over time.
Filed in 1983 and decided by the Supreme Court in 1990, Sullivan v. Zebley is an example of those expansionary pressures and their significant results. When the Social Security Administration stopped making Supplemental Security Income payments to 5-year-old Brian Zebley, despite his continuing and severe disabilities, lawyers at the legal aid organization Community Legal Services filed a class action. Operating from a foundational belief that the welfare state should be more robust, Zebley's lawyers contended that not only had the Social Security Administration erred in Zebley’s case, but also that the Agency’s overall eligibility determination process for child disability benefit claimants was too restrictive. The plaintiffs’ ultimate victory before the Supreme Court, and the surprising allies it amassed along the way, illustrate how readily many actors and institutions connected disability to deservingness and embraced disability as a distributional device in the late twentieth century. The post-Zebley backlash against child claimants, however, illustrates how closely the public continued to associate disability with deviance and fraud, especially when they observed take-up among Black citizens. Negative perceptions contributed to the program’s reform in 1996. Congress preserved the new path to eligibility that Zebley created, but also narrowed it. Decisional power, meanwhile, remained in the hands of medical gatekeepers.
This essay casts the Zebley story as one of triumph and tragedy. It was a triumph for poverty lawyers and their clients, who, under hostile circumstances, pressed for a more generous and life-affirming social welfare system. They saw that the boundaries of disability were malleable and they pushed on them. But it remains a tragedy that the best route to subsistence for so many children has further entangled disability with medicalization, suspicion, and surveillance.
Also of interest: Britney Wilson (New York Law School), Making Me Ill: Environmental Racism and Justice as Disability. Although not a historian, Wilson drew on historical research to explore the intersection of disability, race, civil rights, and environmental justice: Abstract:
Civil rights legal scholars and practitioners have lamented the constraints of the largely intent-based legal framework required to challenge racial discrimination and injustice. As a result, they have sought alternative methods that seemingly require less overt proof of discrimination and are more equipped to address structural harm. One of these proposed solutions involves the use of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—due to its affirmative mandate to address discrimination by reasonable modification or accommodation—and the framing of issues of racial injustice in terms of disability or the deprivation of medical rights. Environmental justice, an area in which issues of both race and disability are salient and affect one another, is one such context in which advocates have tried to use the ADA to challenge broader structural harm. This Article analyzes cases in which practitioners have used the ADA to challenge issues of environmental injustice to examine the purported utility of the ADA, and disability and medicalization framing, more generally, in addressing structural racism and injustice. Specifically, I discuss the attempted use of the ADA to stop the construction of a petrochemical plant in “Cancer Alley,” Louisiana and to challenge mold on behalf of public housing residents in New York City.
The use of the ADA to challenge environmental injustice has clear legal and social justice narrative benefits that explain its appeal, including the required inclusion of people with disabilities in environmental justice campaigns that disproportionately impact them, but from which they are often left out—except for as examples of the negative consequences of harm. However, the promise of these legal theories has not been adequately tested to proffer the ADA as a true alternative to race-based civil rights laws, and there are many suggestions that it is not. Furthermore, the use of disability as both narrative harm and legal strategy in environmental justice campaigns raises important considerations for racism and ableism as interrelated institutional harms. Therefore, any attempt to expand the disability frame in this direction requires an understanding of racism that does not exclude or otherwise undervalue ableism and vice versa. Otherwise, we risk perpetuating the same problems.
The symposium event featured many other scholars. Rabia Belt's remarks may be of particular interest to readers of this blog. A YouTube recording of her panel is available here.
-- Karen Tani
