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5 Disability L.J. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/dislwjn5 and id is 1 raw text is: SUSPICIOUS SPECIES Doron Dorfman* This Article originally appeared in the University of Illinois Law Review, Volume 2021, No. 4, at p. 1363. Service dogs and emotional support animals provide crucial assistance to people with disabilities in many areas of life. As the number of these assistance animals continues to grow, however, so does public suspicion about abuse of law and faking the need for such accommodations. Legislators have been directly reactive to this moral panic, and the majority of states have passed laws to combat the misrepresentation of pets as assistance animals. Consequently, people with disabilities who use service dogs feel the need to signal compliance to avoid harassment, questioning, or exclusion from spaces that do not allow pets. Taking an empirical law and psychology approach, this Article concerns itself with the possible sources of the phenomenon of misrepresentation, which I term assistance-animal disability con. The Article also discusses the stigmatizing consequences of the suspicion surrounding faking the need to use assistance animals for the disability community. The Article shows * Associate Professor of Law, Syracuse University College of Law. This Article has been recognized as the 2019 Best Scholarship by a Junior Faculty in the study of compliance, awarded by ComplianceNET and was the first prize winner of the 2019 Steven M. Block Civil Liberties Award, awarded by Stanford Law School. The data collection was generously supported by the Laboratory for the Study of American Values at Stanford University led by Michael Tomz and Paul Sniderman, the 1