Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

Make It Make Cents: How Defamation's Economic Filter Abandons the Disability Class

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
August 2026
Pages
28
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Abstract

American defamation converts a dignitary injury into a property injury, and the conversion decides who has a remedy. Two filters run in sequence: whether the statement was of and concerning an ascertainable plaintiff, which eliminates statements aimed at classes, and whether the plaintiff can locate the injury on a ledger. Disparagement of a disability is definitionally class directed, since nobody asserts that a named individual lacks a diagnosis; the assertion is that the category itself is fictitious. The first filter therefore extinguishes the claim before the second is reached, and where a plaintiff clears the first, the second sorts claimants by whether they sell the identity rather than by whether they were injured. The advocate who earns a living speaking about a condition can plead injury to trade or business; the worker who merely has it cannot. Three corrections follow from the sources. The decision universally cited for the size rule is two opinions, and neither holds what it is said to hold. The modern test is qualitative, asking the intensity of suspicion cast upon the plaintiff, and it has permitted suit by one of sixty football players while barring one of twelve parking operators. The economic filter reaches written defamation notwithstanding a jurisdictional split over libel per quod, because the constitutional actual injury requirement runs across both from above. And the Americans with Disabilities Act already forbids the inference the disparagement rests on: substantial limitation is assessed without regard to learned adaptive modifications, and coverage extends to a person regarded as impaired whether or not any limitation exists. The Article then reaches the empirical premise underneath the size rule, stated on the face of the controlling authority: that no reasonable reader draws an inference about any individual from a statement about a large class. The research on generic language contradicts it, including the work most skeptical of that literature, which finds that hearing a property predicated of a novel category leads adult listeners to attribute it to an unencountered member. This Article proposes no group libel regime and takes no side in that debate. Its claim is internal. A remedy that scales inversely with the size of the injured class leaves the widest harms with the fewest doors; hostile environment doctrine reaches class directed statements only inside a covered relationship; and a system capable of delivering an identical class disparagement to millions of individual recipients now sits precisely in the gap.

Keywords

  • libel
  • group libel
  • of and concerning
  • ascertainability
  • special damages
  • presumed damages
  • relationship gate
  • generic language
  • ableism
  • hostile environment
  • large language models
  • Neiman-Marcus v. Lait

Plain language slides

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Make It Make Cents: How Defamation's Economic Filter Abandons the Disability Class." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, August 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/make-it-make-cents/

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SSRN version

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