Karen Tani

@kmtani.bsky.social

9219 Followers 1327 Following

Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor in Law & History @Penn. Co-runs the Legal History Blog. Researches/writes about law & modern U.S. history: civil rights, social welfare, disability, federalism, agencies, the state. Dog person.

"The damage extends far beyond provider choice. Gorsuch's narrow definition of "rights" threatens to block Medicaid beneficiaries from enforcing other crucial protections — like requirements that states provide services promptly or guarantee home health care to avoid nursing home placement. For decades, patients could sue when states violated these guarantees. Now that's in doubt. The result? Millions of Americans will have to rely on the federal Executive Branch — which may be unable, or in some administrations unwilling, to enforce the law. Congress wrote these protections for a reason. The Supreme Court just made them much harder to enforce."
Excerpt from Eyer & Tani Yale Law Journal article: "B. Disability and the Contemporary Threat to Spending Clause Legislation." "Even before Justice Rehnquist’s retirement, many observers had declared the Rehnquist Revolution effectively over. But as we detail in this Section, there is at least one area in which the Revolution has never ended: efforts at the Supreme Court to restrain the scope of Congress’s spending power. As in the earlier history we have traced, disability cases have been and continue to be key. This Section illustrates how recent disability cases (often building on older ones) have provided the site for arguments that narrow the scope of Congress’s spending power—and could provide the basis for even further, more radical retrenchments."
"239: Because Section 504 is coercive, untethered to the federal interest in disability, and unfairly retroactive, the Rehabilitation Act is not constitutional under the spending clause."
A box of pignoli (almond flavored cookies covered in pine nuts)
black and white staffordshire bull terrier leaping joyfully on an empty beach
Glass of whiskey next to a votive candle on a wooden table.
flyer for "A Fall Series of Faculty Conversations on Union Organizing at Penn."
Abstract for "DISABILITY AND THE ONGOING FEDERALISM REVOLUTION," 133 YALE L. J. __ (forthcoming) KATIE EYER AND KAREN M. TANI. The Supreme Court’s “new federalism” revolution remains one of the most important developments in recent U.S. legal history. The Court revitalized “states’ rights” doctrines under the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments, rendering states partially or wholly immune from many types of federal litigation. Simultaneously, the Court retrenched the authority of national legislators and aggrandized its own authority, by limiting what Congress may do under its Commerce Clause, Spending Clause, and Fourteenth Amendment powers. But one important facet of this “new federalism” revolution has gone unappreciated: the load-bearing role of earlier disability-related cases. . . .