The Color of Social Security, Race, Disability and Disparity – NOSSCR 2026 Fall National Conference – Track I (Presented by National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives)

Jon C. Dubin, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, Distinguished Professor of Law | Rutgers Law School

Jon C. Dubin is the Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, Distinguished Professor of Law, Paul Robeson Scholar and Director of the Economic Justice and Public Benefits Clinic at Rutgers Law School, Newark Campus where he teaches Administrative Law; Social Security Law; Poverty, Race & Economic Justice; and the Economic Justice & Public Benefits Clinic.

• Education & Credentials

He is a graduate of NYU Law School and Dartmouth College.

• Recognition & Leadership

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance; recipient of the National Organization of Social Security Claimant Representatives (NOSSCR’s) Distinguished Service Award; has supplied solicited testimony to Congress on Social Security Disability Reform; served on the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), Social Security Disability Adjudication Working Group; and served on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Law & Economic Justice/Center for Social Welfare Policy & Law.

• Professional Involvement

He has authored or co-authored numerous books on Social Security Law, Policy or Practice including: SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY LAW AND THE AMERICAN LABOR MARKET (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021); SOCIAL SECURITY LAW AND PRACTICE IN A NUTSHELL (Co-authored with Frank S. Bloch, West Acad. Pub. Co. 2022); ) and SOCIAL SECURITY LAW, POLICY AND PRACTICE: CASES AND MATERIALS (Co-authored with Frank S. Bloch, West Acad. Pub. Co., 2016) His latest forthcoming book is under contract with Cambridge University Press (CUP): THE COLOR OF SOCIAL SECURITY: RACE, RETIREMENT, DISABILITY AND DISPARITY IN THE CROWN JEWEL OF THE WELFARE STATE (CUP, forthcoming 2026).

• Experience

His own law school clinical practice for over 35 years has focused on the social security disability programs, including co-counseling the successful appeal and serving as the principal drafter of the Petitioner’s Brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Sims v. Apfel, 530 U.S. 103 (2000)—a case in which the high court also twice cited Dubin’s National Equal Justice Library award-winning COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW article Torquemada Meets Kafka (1997) and adopted the article’s doctrinal label, “issue exhaustion,” and reasoning in its decision. He was also Counsel of Record for 56 law professors from 40 law schools as Amicus Curiae in the U.S. Supreme Court in Carr v. Saul, 593 U.S. 83 (2021) (extending Sims), and has supervised a dozen successful appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeal, and countless successful appeals in the district courts and in social security administrative hearings.

SESSION 1 – The Color of Social Security, Race, Disability and Disparity | 11:00am – 12:00pm

This session will address the history and treatment of demonstrated adjudicative bias in ALJ hearings and suggested remedies for systemic bias, as well as the historical, antebellum origins and impact of documented present-day medical bias in the assessment of pain and symptomology and the devaluing of Black pain, including the consequences of disparate pain treatment with opiates and stereotypes of “drug-seeking behavior.”

The session will also examine the history and ongoing problem of race-norming and race correction in clinical care support tools, including the application of a recent (2023) POMS provision mitigating use of race-normed eGFR (kidney function) tests in kidney impairment disability evaluations—but no SSA policy action on known race-norming on PFTs (pulmonary function tests) in lung impairment cases, among several other racially normed impairment areas, and no action in response to more recent (2024) HHS regulations proscribing race-norming more broadly by “covered entities” such as the DDSs—along with the equal protection constitutionality of race-norming by SSA and the DDSs alike, and proposed remedies for addressing race-norming in disability cases.

Attendees will further explore the lack of medical or scientific support for the raising of the bar on the Sickle Cell Disease Listing in the 2015 SCD listing changes, as now documented in the December 2025 National Academies report commissioned by Commissioner O’Malley, and SSA’s disparate response to medical community comments on proposed regulations on a Black-identified genetically linked condition like Sickle Cell Disease in contrast to its treatment of medical community comments on a white-identified genetically linked condition in responding to comments on proposed changes to the Cystic Fibrosis listing.

Finally, the session will cover the historical origins, present disparate racial impact, and public policy counter-productivity of the statutory criminal-justice-system-involved restrictions on Social Security benefits, including the incarceration benefits suspension law in OASDI and the felony-related impairment exclusion in the SSDI program.