Somebody pointed out to me a recent Supreme Court decision in New York (note that in New York, the Supreme Court is the general trial court, not the highest court of appeal.)
In effect, the decision seems to give a disabled attorney extra time to complete a task that was supposed to be done within 60 days.
What’s interesting is that we regularly hear stories about disabled students who get extra time on exams, and one of the arguments against this practice is that they won’t get extra time in the real world, as it were.
Well, here’s a guy who was given extra time to take the bar exam, and now he gets extra time to do his job as an attorney.
I have mixed feelings about it - I suppose it’s ok as long as the delay doesn’t inconvenience the other parties. Also, if there’s a “disability” exception to the various time limits imposed by statute, it could lead to a lot of extra litigation.
Also, while this attorney is very clearly disabled, there are other, more borderline cases that would be more troubling.
Where do we draw the line on what is a reasonable accommodation? Should NBA players under 6 feet tall be given special privileges during basketball games because their statures are not as conducive to making a shot as the statures of their larger teammates?
This reminds me of the (in my opinion, absurd) Humphrey lawsuit of a couple of years ago, which entailed a woman with OCD suing her employer after she was fired for neglecting to show up for work. According to the Ninth Circuit Court, the hospital that employed her should have provided reasonable accommodations and allowed her to work from home.
I’m having a problem with this for one reason- I can’t see how a visual disability would cause him to be unable to submit something within 60 days. I can see how he might need extra time to take a bar exam if he had to have the questions read to him, and his answers read back to him, or might need extra time if the time limit for submission was a day or two. But sixty days is enough time to hire a stenographer (through an agency) if, as I suspect, his real problem was the loss of his secretary.
Good point. It’s not like attorneys need to work day and night for the whole 60 days to get the job done. And I could see a lot of energy being spent arguing over which accomodations are necessary and which aren’t. It might be better for society to make life difficult for a few lawyers than to increase the already heavy burden on our judiciary.
Another possibility is that a problem like this could be solved informally. Most lawyers routinely give their adversaries extra time for any reason or no reason at all. I’m sure this is especially so in upstate New York.
I don’t see anyone having fallen into this trap here yet, but it’s worthwhile to separate two questions that seem to be implicit in the topic. First, whether the disabled as a general rule should get assistance to raise them to at least a competitive position equal to others, even if the only way to do this is to raise them higher than the non-disabled, and second, if the answer to the first question is yes, did it go too far in this instance. The first question has already been answered in both the United States and New York in the affirmative, although this is a policy decision upon which the populace might ultimately change its mind. The second is a more open question which has been answered only in this particular case (and which is presumably still open to appeal).
–Cliffy, Esq.