Abstract
In the early years of COVID-19, our willingness to swiftly modify workplaces, classrooms, and other commons generated access at unprecedented scale. These de facto accommodations belied conventional thought about whether institutions can dismantle environments, structures, and practices known to exclude or harm. Decision-makers nationwide improvised under traditional disability law—even if unevenly—generating mass accommodations that represented tens of millions of people problem-solving, experiencing structural access and safety, and intensively collaborating on organizational design over a concerted period. This Article’s argument is two-fold. First, by applying an experiential analysis, legal and non-legal audiences may understand them as disability-informed phenomena that spanned diverse disabilities and accommodations frameworks. Second, mass accommodations signal hidden doctrines we may leverage outside the courts that bolster the role of organizational theory and other models in legal persuasion. By doing so, we decline to concede away normative gains for disability and civil rights law, nor their potential to reconfigure our political economy in the future.
The precedent mass accommodations created, even when flawed and imperfect, still points toward more expansive ways for all to describe structural exclusion and remediation. During COVID-19 two normatively important institutions—worksites and schools—generated new ground in the changes experienced at scale. In spaces for incarceration, however, pandemic policies revealed brute racial and class stratifications that, catastrophically, excluded and ravaged the lives of millions. Evaluating mass accommodations through the lenses of Universal Design theory, the Theory of Racialized Organizations, and aggregate legal approaches—at the meso-level—demonstrates how we might decenter current doctrine and methods as political constraints upon jurisprudence. Conceivably, the collective labor processes that produce “law” at the hyperlocal level may yet help institutions tackle the complex relationships among race, disability, and labor.
Recommended Citation
Shirley Lin,
Mass Accommodations: Signposts to a Hidden Jurisprudence,
74
Emory L. J.
313
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol74/iss2/2