Professor Katherine Macfarlane, Director of the College of Law’s Disability Law and Policy Program, has contributed the article “Disability Documentation and Disability Discrimination” to Human Rights Magazine, a publication of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Section.
The article examines how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has evolved to perpetuate the medical model of disability, rather than the social model of disability, regarding documentation of a disability to receive accommodations. The article features a personal experience Macfarlane encountered when requesting accommodation for a disability.
Macfarlane writes, “Documentation of disability can be so expensive that it is impossible for people with disabilities to obtain it. However, documentation requirements also impose costs on the employers — and colleges and universities — that create them. Someone must collect and review the documentation. Follow-up requests for additional documentation, which are common, are also time-consuming. The bureaucracy that has arisen around the documentation requirement is incredibly expensive. And for what? Is it truly necessary to have an employee on staff whose sole job is reviewing forms and records submitted by a person asking for an additional restroom break? What do we accomplish with bloated systems like these?
Not much, I argue. It’s time for the extra-statutory documentation requirements to be re-examined, if not abandoned outright. This sort of change can happen immediately. No law requires documentation.”
Macfarlane will participate in the ABA webinar “Disability Rights: A Conversation with Human Rights Magazine Authors.” The free webinar is scheduled for Friday, July 25, from 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET. Register at: https://www.americanbar.org/events-cle/mtg/web/452129295/?login
The article appears in the July 2025 issue on Disability Rights: The Work Continues.