Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2020
Abstract
This essay reflects on Craig Konnoth’s recent Article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, which is a carefully crafted and thought-provoking description of the refashioning of civil rights claims into medical rights frameworks. He compellingly threads together many intellectual traditions—from antidiscrimination law to disability law to health law—to illustrate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon that he describes and why it might be productive as a tool to advance civil rights.
This response, however, offers several reasons why medicalization may not cure all that ails civil rights litigation’s pains and elaborates on the potential risks of overinvesting in medical rights-seeking. It concludes by considering how the COVID-19 pandemic, which has produced a dramatic medical manifestation of social inequities growing out of decades of civil rights deprivation, can illuminate potential benefits and risks of medicalization.
Keywords
Civil rights law, discrimination, inequality, health policy, health law, conceptual & rhetorical framing, medicalization, Craig Konnoth, individual vs. structural remedies, harm, equal protection, policy feedback
Publication Title
Stanford Law Review Online
Repository Citation
Hoffman, Allison K., "How Medicalization of Civil Rights Could Disappoint" (2020). All Faculty Scholarship. 2205.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2205
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Courts Commons, Disability Law Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Remedies Commons, Legal Theory Commons, Medical Jurisprudence Commons, Medicine and Health Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons
Publication Citation
72 Stan. L. Rev. Online 165 (2020)