Berkeley Legal History Workshop Welcomes Karen Tani, University of Pennsylvania

Karen Tani is the Seaman Family University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is jointly appointed in law and history. She is the author of the prize-winning book States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Her current research, on the history of disability and law in the late twentieth century, has recently appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the California Law Review, and elsewhere.

Paper Title

“They Were the Cotton”: Disability and Extraction in Modern U.S. Legal History

Abstract

At first glance, the last several decades of the twentieth century appear to be a time of extraordinary legal gains for American with disabilities. But supportive changes came with a darker side, which most scholars have neglected. State and local governments, as well as private corporations, quickly learned how to reap their own rewards from the rights and benefits intended for disabled Americans. State governments increasingly turned poor and disabled residents into sources of revenue as private companies developed lucrative contracting roles within the welfare state. These dynamics continue into the present. For instance, the recent Supreme Court case Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski—an ostensible victory for disabled people and victims of abuse—highlights the endurance of the for-profit nursing home industry, its entanglement in a dense web of public and private revenue-seeking, and the failure of existing laws and administrative mechanisms to curb abuses. This trajectory suggests the need for a new theory of the modern American welfare state: alongside shoring up the labor market, frustrating collective organizing, enforcing particular visions of citizenship, and regulating behavior, the welfare state has also become a vehicle for channeling revenue from one part of the state to other parts, with little regard for the individuals that function as conduits.

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