Civil Rights Insights
Analysis and practical guides on civil rights.
4 articles, checklists, and guides on civil rights law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Disability Rights Toolkit: Accommodation Requests, Access Complaints, and Housing Modifications
This toolkit supplies the letters, scripts, and worksheets used to request disability accommodations and to enforce access rights when a request is refused. It includes a general accommodation request, a provider verification letter written to disclose the minimum required, separate housing accommodation and modification requests that make the payment allocation explicit, a barrier removal letter that asks for alternative methods in the same breath, an effective communication request, a verbatim script for the two questions about a service animal, a follow-up letter for a denial that reframes the "we treat everyone the same" response, complaint narratives for DOJ and HUD, a retaliation letter, and an access log and measurement worksheet for building the record.
Disability Access and Accommodation Request Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist covers a disability accommodation request from the sentence you say at the counter through the agency complaint. It sets out how to phrase the request, exactly how much documentation you owe and what a provider letter should not contain, and the different rules that apply in businesses, government offices, housing, air travel, transit, and online. It gives the two questions a business may ask about a service animal and the broader housing rule, separates reasonable accommodations from reasonable modifications and identifies who pays for each, and lays out the escalation ladder with the filing deadlines that forfeit rights—including the one-year housing administrative window.
Requesting Disability Accommodations and Enforcing Access Rights: A Practical Guide
This guide is about the practical craft of asking—how to make a disability accommodation request that gets granted, and what to do when it is not. It explains why the specific sentence you use matters more than the statute you cite, how much medical documentation is actually required and what a provider letter should and should not say, and how to run the interactive process without giving away information you do not have to disclose. It covers the different rules for stores, governments, landlords, airlines, and websites, including the exact two questions a business may ask about a service animal and the broader housing rule for assistance animals. It then walks the escalation path: the written follow-up, the person whose job this is, the agency complaint and its deadlines, and the choice between federal and state routes, where state law is frequently the better one.
Disability Rights in Everyday Life: The ADA, Service Animals, and Accessible Housing
Disability rights law is the rare body of federal law an ordinary person invokes by talking to a store manager. This article explains what the Americans with Disabilities Act actually requires of governments and businesses, and—just as importantly—what it does not. It distinguishes Title II from Title III, explains reasonable modification, readily achievable barrier removal, and effective communication, and works through the two questions a business may lawfully ask about a service animal. It then turns to housing, where the Fair Housing Act operates on a different logic: reasonable accommodations that a landlord pays for, reasonable modifications that the tenant pays for, and design requirements for covered multifamily buildings. It covers air travel under its own separate statute, the growing law of website accessibility, and the remedies that are and are not available—including why most ADA plaintiffs cannot recover damages.