PROFESSOR MAKHLOUF CONTRIBUTES TO NEW VOLUME EXAMINING THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMING OF DISABILITY
April 2020 — This month, Cambridge University Press published Disability, Health, Law and Bioethics, an edited volume based on the 2018 annual conference of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The volume examines how different frameworks for understanding disability can affect medical, legal, and social structures. Professor Makhlouf’s chapter in the volume analyzes the treatment of disability within U.S. immigration law.
Immigration law has been shaped by an early-twentieth-century conception of disability. Specifically, the law of immigration admissions contains stigmatizing assumptions about the connections between disability and economic dependence. Professor Makhlouf reimagines what the law of immigration admissions might look like if it were to treat disability as a “mere difference” from the norm rather than a “bad difference.” She argues that a strategy modeled on a civil rights approach, which would treat disability as a neutral factor in admissions decisions, would be ineffective at destigmatizing disabilities that have inherent costs. The chapter concludes by proposing an alternative framing of disability as a common form of human variation that is inevitable for many.
Professor Medha D. Makhlouf is an Assistant Professor and Founding Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. Professor Makhlouf’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of health law, immigrants’ rights, and poverty law and policy. Her recent scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review Online, and the American Journal of Law and Medicine. Professor Makhlouf’s work is available at https://works.bepress.com/medha-makhlouf/.