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June 18, 2026 / 6:21 PM EDT
/ CBS News
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The Justice Department released a new legal opinion Thursday that civil rights experts said represents a significant attack against people with mental, physical and intellectual disabilities who receive state-funded services.The Office of Legal Counsel opinion said states are not actually required by law to integrate mentally disabled patients with their peers by providing community or home-based care, a finding experts say runs counter to long-standing legal precedent and would lead to greater rates of institutionalizing people with disabilities.The OLC opinion, authored by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit and posted on the DOJ's website, reinterprets a long-standing Supreme Court case that has served as a cornerstone of America's disability rights law.That 1999 case, Olmstead v. LC, held that people with disabilities are entitled to receive services in their communities, rather than an institution."The Olmstead decision itself said that why community integration is so important is so children can be part of their families, so they can go to school, so people can be part of their communities," said Alison Barkoff, a former DOJ attorney who was in charge of supervising Olmstead civil rights enforcement and now works as a professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. "That's what's at stake with this re-interpretation of Olmstead."The Olmstead case was brought by two women with mental and intellectual disabilities who were each repeatedly institutionalized at facilities in Georgia because they could not get coverage for the support they needed to live independently at home.The Supreme Court held that the state had violated their civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
