Where do-and should-future disabilities fit within the law? Disability civil rights laws expressly extend rights to individuals with present or past disabilities, but it remains unsettled how the prospect of acquiring a disability in the future should be understood within these laws. Resolving this question is crucial not only for continued refinement of disability civil rights doctrine, but the inquiry has broader civil rights and healthcare implications given racial disparities in exposures to potentially disabling circumstances and the negative health effects of racism itself. This Article is the first to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of how future disabilities can be understood within disability civil rights laws. I articulate two overarching frameworks for situating future disabilities in the law. The first framework, which I describe as anticipatory accommodations, concerns efforts by an individual to obtain disability accommodations in the present to counter the possibility of acquiring a disability in the future, such as a person seeking disability accommodations to avoid COVID-19 exposure that they believe may lead to a future disability. The second framework, which I describe as preemptive disability stigma, concerns adverse treatment of an individual in the present based on others' perception that the individual may acquire a future disability, such as an employer firing an employee who they believe might become disabled. The Article addresses a critical doctrinal gap by articulating and analyzing each framework. I conclude that only a narrower subset of claims within the anticipatory accommodations framework appears apt for resolution under disability civil rights laws, but claims under the preemptive disability stigma framework align with the laws' scope and could meaningfully advance their nondiscrimination purpose. I then call for clarification of the proper application of disability civil rights laws to future disabilities through judicial interpretation and, to the extent needed, regulatory and statutory reform. Lastly, this Article sets the stage for further work evaluating potential interventions beyond civil rights law that can more directly target the ways that racial subordination disparately produces both future disabilities and negative health outcomes.
The California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) has reshaped local elections across the State of California. The CVRA spurred hundreds of cities, school districts, and other local governments to transition from at-large elections, where all voters in the local government's territory vote for all members of the local government's board, to district-based elections, where a local government's territory is subdivided into election districts that each independently elect a member to the local government's board. Although the CVRA attempts to address racial vote dilution, which is sometimes present in at-large elections, this Note finds that the CVRA creates unique incentives to adopt district-based elections, and that hundreds of California school districts have adopted district-based elections in the last twenty years. Existing literature found that CVRA-driven transitions to district-based elections created inconsistent effects, increasing descriptive representation of racial minorities(1) in some jurisdictions while having no or even negative effects on minority representation in others. Drawing on data collected from school districts in the Bay Area, a recent hotbed of CVRA activity, this Note finds that although the CVRA has likely had a positive effect on Latine and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) officeholding in Bay Area school districts, our findings align with existing literature that some Bay Area school districts see no or even negative changes in Latine and AAPI officeholding following CVRA-driven transitions to district-based elections. California currently constructively prohibits many other forms of elections that could better increase minority officeholding in places like the Bay Area beyond district-based elections. This Note argues that California law should be reformed to permit alternatives to district-based elections, such as cumulative voting, that might better improve minority officeholding. This Note further argues that the CVRA should be amended to remove current incentives to switch to district-based elections, which have discouraged the use of alternative election systems.
Nearly every Chapter 11 filing is "voluntary,"in that it's initiated by the company's managers. Yet the Bankruptcy Code also allows unsecured creditors to force a company to reorganize under an "involuntary Chapter 11." Involuntary Chapter 11s are rare and largely ignored by scholars. That's potentially because bankruptcy and corporate law largely defer to managers' business judgment on how to maximize the company's value, and investors have several contract and corporate law tools designed to discipline underperforming managers. So, what work can involuntary Chapter 11s do? This Article shows that an involuntary Chapter 11 can be the optimal solution for a company with going-concern value that simultaneously faces two kinds of distress: financial distress-such as running out of cash or taking on too much debt-and managerial distress-such as deadlocked, absent, or dysfunctional leadership that can't run the company. When both kinds of distress simultaneously set in, ordinary contract and corporate law solutions misfire, jeopardizing the company's value. The company then needs an external party to force it into Chapter 11, which provides a toolkit designed to comprehensively address both financial and managerial distress. This Article makes three main contributions. First, it shows that involuntary Chapter 11s have an important, but underappreciated, role to play in salvaging firms that have going-concern value. Second, it reveals how the current involuntary Chapter 11 system isn't geared to serve that role because it allows a narrow class of investors to throw a company into Chapter 11 without having to show that the company faces managerial distress. Third, it sketches a new involuntary Chapter 11 system that incentivizes a wide range of investors to file involuntary Chapter 11s against companies facing both kinds of distress, while penalizing them for filing such cases against companies that face only one or neither kind of distress.
Between 2020 and 2024, the Department of Education undertook two massive experiments on the student loan system. The first was the "payment pause"-a three-and-a-half-year suspension of payment obligations and interest accrual on all student loans owed to the federal government, enacted in response to the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The second consisted of a series of orders and regulations that together would have remade the federal student loan repayment system after the COVID emergency by writing down large amounts of debt owed, making payments much more universally affordable, and rendering the payment process easier and more automatic. These were the "Eiden Reforms." Both of these efforts were almost entirely the result of administrative interpretation of longstanding statutory law, with Congress playing at most a supporting role. The payment pause, which went entirely unchallenged despite its ambitious reading of existing statutory law, was an enormous success. The Biden Reforms, which engendered intense partisan opposition, were mostly stopped before they took effect. And the Trump administration has begun to use its own administrative interpretations (or executive ignoring of statutes) to tear up core parts of federal higher education finance. This Article explains how these initiatives came about, how the Biden Reforms were foiled, and how the conflicts around both have reshaped the law and politics of student loans moving forward. We argue that the federal student loan system that developed under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and matured by the 1990s enabled insider-driven politics that allowed for legislative compromise. Inside the Beltway, bargaining between the government and private sector actors in the aid system made incremental adjustments possible primarily via legislative amendments; outside the Beltway, student loans served as a necessary institution to promote individual investments in higher education as costs rose. This normal politics deteriorated as problems with the student loan system became increasingly obvious and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed massive disruptions to family finances. The Biden Reforms were an effort to return to something like the status quo ante by resolving the ambiguities in student loan law in favor of a more progressively structured and user-friendly system. Intense opposition to these attempts threw the system into disarray and left us with a more populist, partisan, and polarized politics of student loans in which previously unthinkable progressive and regressive extremes have entered the realm of possibility.
Across the post-Dobbs United States, reports ofpregnant people battling infections as severe as sepsis,1 experiencing hemorrhaging, and suffering from other pregnancy complications in hospital emergency rooms are flooding the news.2 Even in states like California, which has some of the nation's strongest abortion protections, some hospitals are still denying pregnant patients the emergency abortion care they so desperately need.3 Because of state abortion bans' lack of clarity about medical exceptions and the overall chilling effect on abortion care, many patients are being denied the emergency care that they need or are being forced to wait until they are knocking on death's door before medical staff can treat them. Some patients are being airlifted to out-of-state hospitals for treatment elsewhere, and many who are forced to wait until their health deteriorates are taking matters into their own hands and choosing to travel out-of-state-often at great health risk-if they have the means. Healthcare professionals who work in states with criminal abortion bans face an impossible scenario that scholars have termed the "double abortion bind": the impossible choice between, on the one hand, providing patients with emergency lifesaving abortions and facing potential criminal liability for violating their state's abortion ban and, on the other hand, not providing emergency abortions and potentially losing their patients and facing medical malpractice claims for violating the standard of care. Litigators nationwide are fighting in state courts to clarify the medical exceptions in abortion bans. While legal scholars have explored criminal liability and the various implications of criminal abortion bans for patients and medical professionals, the civil liability component including that of medical malpractice lawsuits remains murkier, in part due to a dearth of such cases. But as more and more patients suffer and die while waiting for emergency medical care or are denied such care altogether, civil cases are beginning to emerge. This Note asks what role tort claims specifically, medical malpractice suits can play in the area of emergency abortion access. Can torts realistically provide useful legal recourse for impacted patients and apply new pressure on healthcare industry actors to widen emergency abortion access? This Note analyzes whether such claims could be used to pressure hospital systems into broadening emergency access to lifesaving abortion care and sketches one potential path forward.
