Article by Deirdre M. Smith
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), enacted by Congress seventeen years ago, offered disabled people a hope for equality and access that has not been fulfilled. Court decisions halt an overwhelming majority of claims at the summary judgment stage. A key mechanism for fencing out disabled people's claims is an improper and pernicious requirement, based upon the very construction of disability that the ADA's proponents aimed to dispel, that medical evidence is required as a threshold matter to demonstrate that the statute applies. The stated rationales applied to the medical evidence requirement, such as the need for corroborating evidence, objective evidence, or evidence to assist juries in assessing disabilities that are not obvious, do not withstand analysis under either the substantive law of the ADA or broader summary judgment principles. Such a requirement in fact reflects an unstated rationale: a deep-seated skepticism of those claiming disability generally and ADA plaintiffs specifically. As a result, judges disregard the proper analysis to be applied to summary judgment motions and instead impose a hypertechnical, heightened evidentiary burden on plaintiffs in an effort to foreclose potential malingers' claims from reaching the trial stage. The determination of whether a person is truly disabled or merely exaggerating her condition to achieve some secondary gain through ADA litigation is one more properly left to jurors than to doctors. The continued hegemony of medicine in identifying disability, as demonstrated in the view that physicians can and should serve as gatekeepers of disability claims, wrongly pathologizes and demeans the category of disability and undermines the statute's effectiveness as a tool to advance civil rights.
About the Author
Deirdre M. Smith. Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law. B.A. 1988, University of Pennsylvania; J.D. 1994, University of Maine School of Law.
Citation
82 Tul. L. Rev. 1 (2007)