Creative Commons
Judge Jack Weinstein
Federal District Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who died on June 15 at age ninety-nine, was “known for crafting large, complex settlements, seeking to correct the injustices of the world from his bench and treating every defendant before him with kindness,” according to the first sentence of his obituary in The Wall Street Journal.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 amplified a racist, sexist stereotype of “welfare queens” and enlarged a campaign to vilify people receiving public benefits as unworthy idlers.
As a young Columbia Law School professor in the 1950s, Weinstein worked with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP on the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court school desegregation case. In his fifty-three years of teaching law, he became an authority on the federal rules of courtroom evidence and on New York state court civil procedure, writing treatises on both subjects.
Weinstein is best known for three matters: his successful oversight of the 1984 Agent Orange settlement in litigation brought by Vietnam veterans exposed to the chemical; his unsuccessful effort to structure a similar proceeding against manufacturers of so-called “light” cigarettes; and his vigorous opposition to severe, mandatory federal criminal sentencing requirements.
He also issued a ruling of great importance to people with disabilities. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits have provided essential financial support to millions of adults and children for decades. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 amplified a racist, sexist stereotype of “welfare queens” and enlarged a campaign to vilify people receiving public benefits as unworthy idlers.
The new administration quickly extended its dogma to the SSDI program, which workers paid for every payday by a deduction from their paychecks. While Congress had allowed a separate Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) disability program for impoverished people who had not contributed sufficient payments to qualify for SSDI, the Reagan Administration acted to exclude both current beneficiaries and new applicants from receiving disability benefits.
And that created a problem that would land on Weinstein’s desk.
Before Reagan took office, the Social Security Administration had established a “sequential evaluation” process to determine if people were eligible for disability benefits. If the applicant was not working because of a medically determined condition, the agency asked a series of three questions:
- Did the condition qualify as a disability under pre-established “listings,” or written standards, by which the agency defined specified impairments, such as cerebral palsy, blindness or schizophrenia? If so, the applicant qualified.
- If the applicant did not meet the listings, could the applicant still do any past relevant work (such as a teacher who had once been a computer programmer and retained those skills)? If so, the applicant did not qualify, but the agency then asked:
- Could the applicant do other work “in the national economy,” regardless of the location of those jobs or their availability? Only if the answer was “no” could the applicant qualify.
The sequence demonstrates the difficulty of qualifying. The process assumed a mythical availability of appropriate jobs in all parts of the country, urban and rural. If an applicant managed to qualify, that person likely was truly disabled.
In the early 1980s, New York City faced a crisis of homelessness and unemployment. While addressing the medical, financial and housing needs of those residents, social workers also explored the possibilities of their clients’ eligibility for SSDI or SSI disability benefits.
City officials discovered that many applicants for those benefits—especially those with mental illnesses—met rejection by the Social Security Administration. Moreover, under a policy adopted by the Reagan Administration, persons already receiving benefits were “re-evaluated,” with many recipients terminated from the program.
And so the city of New York, joined by the attorney general of New York state, sued the Social Security Administration in federal court, challenging the process followed by the agency in denying eligibility to the residents. The case was assigned to Judge Weinstein, then chief judge of the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn.
The litigation concentrated on agency denials of applications by persons seeking benefits because of mental illness and challenged bureaucratic practices that had existed before Reagan took office. New York requested Weinstein to certify the case as a class action on behalf of applicants denied benefits.
The case proceeded as a regular civil case, with the opportunity for a trial with witnesses heard by the judge. Lawyers representing New York confirmed, through discovery of agency internal memoranda, practices in denying benefits and presented the evidence in a seven-day trial.
In January 1984, Weinstein ruled for New York and the thousands of people included in the class action seeking disability benefits.
“Contrary to legal requirements, the Social Security Administration has consistently followed a policy which presumes that mentally disabled claimants who do not meet or equal the listings necessarily retain sufficient residual functional capacity to do at least ‘unskilled work,’ ” Weinstein wrote. “Sequential evaluation ends without assessing residual functional capacity or ability to engage in work.”
Weinstein held that the agency was violating its own regulations by failing to complete the full sequential evaluation process. In cases claiming mental disability, it stopped at the listings stage and automatically denied benefits if it concluded the applicant did not meet the listings. He said the process was illegal because it was secret: “Evidence of the fixed clandestine policy against those with mental illness is overwhelming.”
Moreover, Weinstein recognized the vulnerability of this group of applicants. “The mentally ill are particularly vulnerable to bureaucratic errors,” he wrote. “Some do not even understand the communications they receive from SSA. Others are afraid of the system. Even with help from social workers and others, many do not appeal denials or terminations.”
If Weinstein had done nothing more than expose and condemn the secret policy, his decision would have been a landmark. But equally important was the remedy he granted, ordering the Social Security Administration to reopen agency decisions denying or terminating disability benefits and to redetermine eligibility.
The scope, and potential expense, of Weinstein’s extraordinary injunction guaranteed that the Reagan Administration would appeal. Nothing could have better validated the merits of Weinstein’s ruling—and surprised Reagan’s Justice Department—than the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion upholding the decision.
The case had political consequences. Before the Supreme Court ruled, Reagan removed Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, who supervised the Social Security Administration, and appointed Otis R. Bowen, a physician and former governor of Indiana. Judge Weinstein’s vivid description of the agency’s duplicity and the harm suffered by the vulnerable class of people seeking disability benefits rebutted the stereotypes inflicted by the Reagan Administration on recipients of public benefits.
The Supreme Court affirmed Weinstein’s ruling in 1986.
Four years later, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, with the House roll call vote 377—28 and the Senate 91-6.
The legal worlds of the ADA and Social Security are distinct and quite different, each addressing separate aspects of the lives of people with disabilities. But perhaps Judge Weinstein’s exposure of the Social Security scandal, and his bold remedy, helped dramatize the need to integrate people with disabilities into our society.