Abstract
Plaintiffs alleging disability discrimination under New Mexico law face significantly higher barriers than plaintiffs alleging other types of discrimination. The plain text of the New Mexico Human Rights Act (“NMHRA”) provides equal protections against discrimination based on characteristics such as race, gender, pregnancy, and disability. However, by relying on federal disability law to guide the interpretation of the NMHRA in cases of disability discrimination, New Mexico courts have effectively created a two-tiered system in which claims of disability discrimination face higher barriers to prevail in an administrative adjudication and survive summary judgment than other discrimination claims. This two-tiered system not only treats disability discrimination as a second-class form of discrimination; it poses a risk to other types of discrimination claims as it expands. For example, a recent case relegated pregnancy discrimination to the second tier by treating pregnancy like a disability. This comment argues that, rather than await the further erosion of the NMHRA’s protections against employment discrimination, New Mexico courts should return to their earlier jurisprudence that treated disability discrimination as equally suspect—and subject to the same standards—as race, age, and gender discrimination. Doing so will restore the protections contemplated by the plain text and original intent of the NMHRA.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ellen Rabin,
The Barrier and the Burden: How Flawed Interpretations of the New Mexico Human Rights Act Have Relegated Disability to Second-Class Status,
56
N.M. L. Rev.
199
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol56/iss1/8
