Cost-Benefit Analysis Without Analyzing Costs of Benefits: Reasonable Accommodation, Balancing, and Stigmatic Harms

19 Pages Posted: 28 Jan 2007

See all articles by Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein

Harvard Law School; Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)

Abstract

Is an accommodation reasonable, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, if and only if the benefits are roughly proportional to the costs? How should benefits and costs be assessed? Should courts asks about how much disabled employees are willing to pay to obtain the accommodation, or instead how much they would have to be paid not to have the accommodation? How should stigmatic or expressive harms be valued? This essay, written for a symposium on the work of Judge Richard A. Posner, engages these questions in a discussion of an important opinion in which Judge Posner denied accommodations involving the lowering of a sink in a kitchenette and a request for telecommuting. The problem with the analysis in that opinion is that it does not seriously analyze either costs or benefits. A general lesson is that while cost-benefit balancing can helpfully discipline unreliable intuitions about the effects of requested accommodations, it can also incorporate those intuitions. Another lesson is that stigmatic harms and daily humiliations deserve serious attention as part of the inquiry into which accommodations are reasonable, and that the removal of those harms and humiliations can create real benefits. Adequate cost-benefit analyses must attempt to measure and include those benefits.

Keywords: disability, reasonable Accommodation, cost-benefit analysis

Suggested Citation

Sunstein, Cass R., Cost-Benefit Analysis Without Analyzing Costs of Benefits: Reasonable Accommodation, Balancing, and Stigmatic Harms. University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming, University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 325, University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 149, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=959712

Cass R. Sunstein (Contact Author)

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Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) ( email )

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