Part I

The Argument

The Note’s legal argument, in brief; the full fifteen-minute version and the manuscript carry the citations. Its center: for a record-dependent right, a minimally sufficient, claimant-accessible record is not an added benefit — it is what makes the right usable.

In 2010, a housing authority issued Donavette Ely a larger Section 8 voucher because of her son’s disability — its own written explanation said so. When she later needed more time to use it, the Eleventh Circuit held the authority could not be liable, because Ely “never explained” the connection to his disability. The explanation was sitting in the authority’s own file. No record system carried it forward. Ely v. Mobile Housing Board, 605 F. App’x 846, 851–52 (11th Cir. 2015).

That is the problem in miniature. Disability fair-housing rights are record-dependent: proving them turns on records of what landlords and housing agencies did — who requested what and when, what the answer was, which accessible units exist and who lives in them. HUD’s instruments create pieces of those records; no identified coordinated federal system reliably collects, links, or makes them accessible. Congress gave HUD express data-collection rulemaking authority in 1988, and HUD’s own regulation has named disability-related data categories since 1989.

The enforcement backdrop makes the gap concrete. A case-level census of 595 decided federal disability fair-housing cases found eighteen qualifying plaintiff-side judgments — nine final contested judgments awarding relief, two final default judgments, and seven liability determinations — a combined 18/595 (3.0%). In every one, counsel had appeared for the plaintiff; none arose in a pro se case (0 of 397). Meanwhile the pro se share of the decided docket rose from 60.1% to 75.9%. These are descriptive results, not causal estimates; the evidence and limits page states the boundaries.

The proposed response is deliberately narrow: a petition under 5 U.S.C. § 553(e) asking HUD for a defined minimum-record rule grounded in the authority Congress granted in 1988. HUD must respond and state its grounds; an unreasoned denial gets ordinary arbitrary-and-capricious review, and the remedy is a remand for explanation — not judicial database design. The limiting principle: make duties Congress already enacted verifiable; derive no new obligations.

Read the full argument

• The argument in fifteen minutes — the case, the authorities, the administrative record, the remedy, and the objections with answers.
• The full manuscript — every proposition with complete citations.
• The administrative record — the dated paper trail behind the argument.