Social Security Disability Law and the American Labor Market

About the Book

How social security disability law is out of touch with the contemporary American labor market
Passing down nearly a million decisions each year, more judges handle disability cases for the Social Security Administration than federal civil and criminal cases combined.
In Social Security Disability Law and the American Labor Market, Jon C. Dubin challenges the contemporary policies for determining disability benefits and work assessment. He posits the fundamental questions: where are the jobs for persons with significant medical and vocational challenges? And how does the administration misfire in its standards and processes for answering that question? Deploying his profound understanding of the Social Security Administration and Disability law and policy, he demystifies the system, showing us its complex inner mechanisms and flaws, its history and evolution, and how changes in the labor market have rendered some agency processes obsolete. Dubin lays out how those who advocate eviscerating program coverage and needed life support benefits in the guise of modernizing these procedures would reduce the capacity for the Social Security Administration to function properly and serve its intended beneficiaries, and argues that the disability system should instead be "mended, not ended."
Dubin argues that while it may seem counterintuitive, the transformation from an industrial economy to a twenty-first-century service economy in the information age, with increased automation, and resulting diminished demand for arduous physical labor, has not meaningfully reduced the relevance of, or need for, the disability benefits programs. Indeed, they have created new and different obstacles to work adjustments based on the need for other skills and capacities in the new economy—especially for the significant portion of persons with cognitive, psychiatric, neuro-psychological, or other mental impairments. Therefore, while the disability program is in dire need of empirically supported updating and measures to remedy identified deficiencies, obsolescence, inconsistencies in application, and racial, economic and other inequities, the program's framework is sufficiently broad and enduring to remain relevant and faithful to the Act's congressional beneficent purposes and aspirations.

About the Author :
Jon C. Dubin is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of Law, and Associate Dean for Clinical Education at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey. He is co-author of eleven editions of the treatise, Social Security Disability Law and Procedure in Federal Court, the only hardcover textbook on social security law, Social Security Law, Policy, and Practice: Cases and Materials, and the forthcoming Nutshell on Social Security Law.

Review :
"This is an excellent, long-term overview of the social security disability programs that comes to grips with the current challenges and offers recommendations for ongoing reform. I don't know of any project that's assembled the history of these programs as comprehensively as Dubin has done. An excellent history by an extremely careful and well-known scholar." - Matthew Diller, Dean and Paul Fuller Professor of Law, Fordham University Law School "A comprehensive review of the influence of labor market considerations on the evolution of the Social Security Act's disability standard and the administrative tools used to adjudicate the 'ability to engage in substantial gainful activity' component of that standard. In this important book, Dubin examines the implications of a changing labor market on the availability of jobs for persons with disabilities and explores the challenges that presents to the existing structure and administration of Social Security disability programs." - Frank Bloch, editor of The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice "Provides a detailed account of the longstanding and ongoing disputes among Congress, the Social Security Administration, and the courts on the fundamental question of who should be excused from working because of disability and granted economic and health care support by the government. Dubin explores the obvious flaws in the current adjudicative system, including reliance on outdated labor market data, demonstrates the fallacious assumptions of those who would make the system even harsher than it is today, and suggests sensible improvements. A must read for policy wonks, as well as serious practitioners." - Robert E. Rains, Professor Emeritus and founder of the Disability Law Clinic, Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law