Accommodation Mandates

Abstract

The history of employment law has witnessed a move from mandates directed to workers as a whole, such as workers' compensation, to mandates directed to particular, identifiable groups of workers, such as the reasonable accommodation mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act. These newer "accommodation mandates" are ordinarily analyzed using an economic framework developed for mandates directed to workers as a whole. However, this framework yields misleading and incorrect conclusions when applied to accommodation mandates. This Article offers a new framework for analyzing accommodation mandates. The framework generates testable predictions about the effects of these mandates-predictions that are largely confirmed by the existing empirical evidence.