The Legal Aid Society brought this class action lawsuit to challenge two unlawful Reagan-era Social Security Administration (SSA) policies which prevented thousands of New Yorkers from accessing disability benefits. The suit challenged the SSA’s “non-acquiescence” policy, under which Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) were instructed to disregard federal appellate court holdings when those decisions conflicted with the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s policy positions, and the “Bellmon Review” policy, where ALJs with a high percentage of pro-claimant determinations were subjected to agency-initiated reviews.

In 1992, we entered into a settlement in which the SSA agreed to direct ALJs to comply with Second Circuit holdings, to rescind policies that encouraged non-acquiescence and to abandon targeting ALJs for review based on their percentage of disability grants, and to re-examine 40,000 cases a year of New Yorkers whose claims were denied or terminated on the grounds that they were not disabled.