The Annual Pike Lecture featuring Professor Samuel Bagenstos

Boston University School of Law is pleased to invite you to the Annual Pike Lecture on Tuesday, October 7th featuring Frank G. Millard Professor of Law Samuel R. Bagenstos, of Michigan Law. Please note that this lecture will be offered in person, and recorded. We will share the recording on our BU Law YouTube Channel.

For roughly half a century, United States law and policy toward disability has moved — unsteadily but clearly — in the direction of equality and integration for disabled people.  Notable milestones include civil rights laws such as the Rehabilitation Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the ADA Amendments Act — as well as agency regulations and important judicial decisions interpreting those laws, such as Olmstead v. L.C.  Important milestones also included changes in health and social welfare law and policy, including Congress’s repeated expansion of home and community-based services under Medicaid — along with important federal agency actions making those expansions progressively more meaningful — the widespread adoption of “housing first” over more punitive approaches to addressing homelessness, and the expansion of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and other statutes.

All of the key elements of that progress are now under extreme threat.  Recent opinions from the Supreme Court and lower federal courts signal a readiness to reverse prior holdings advancing equality and integration and squelch federal agency efforts to achieve these ends.  In the Executive Branch, the federal government is dramatically moving away from its prior commitment to integration and housing first.  And the ACA’s expansion of health insurance has already been significantly undone by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — with more elements of a “Great Retrenchment” on the way.  At the same time, a libertarian-eugenic ideology has taken hold over health policy, with the express goal of ending disability — and the clear message that those who are disabled have their own, and their families’, choices to blame.  This lecture will detail the half-century of progress in disability law and policy, and show how that progress faces severe threats in our current moment.