The AI Ramp Doctrine

What Is the AI Ramp Doctrine?

The AI Ramp Doctrine is a simple idea with serious implications: when a disabled person uses generative AI to interpret, organize, and respond to complex legal processes, that AI is functioning as an accessibility aid. In practice, it operates like a cognitive ramp, translating hostile or inaccessible systems into something a disabled litigant can actually navigate.

This doctrine does not claim that AI is a lawyer, a judge, or a replacement for human support. It recognizes that, in the absence of meaningful accommodations from courts and agencies, generative AI can be the only tool that makes participation possible.

Why This Doctrine Exists

Court systems assume a specific kind of brain: fast processing, high working memory, comfort with dense text, and the ability to track multiple moving parts without support. Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, brain-injured, and otherwise disabled people are routinely punished for not matching that template.

The AI Ramp Doctrine is an answer to this failure. It documents and formalizes a pattern that already exists:

• Disabled litigants using generative AI to decode legal jargon and court orders into plain language.
• Autistic people using AI to structure timelines, filings, and evidence under extreme cognitive load.
• Courts denying ADA accommodations while expecting professional-grade pro se filings.
• AI quietly filling the gap created by inaccessible systems and hostile gatekeepers.

Case Study: Strickland v. Ramsey County, et al.

In my own federal civil rights case, generative AI is not a hypothetical. It is the tool I used to:

• Interpret conflicting orders and hearing notices, including altered and reissued documents.
• Reconstruct a timeline across multiple state dockets with irregular records.
• Draft motions, surreplies, and declarations after the ADA coordinator refused to assist.
• Maintain a public legal archive so attorneys, investigators, and the public can see what happened.

When state-level courts denied my accommodation requests and muted my mic during hearings, generative AI was the only consistent accessibility support I had. That is what “AI ramp” means in practice.

Core Principles of the AI Ramp Doctrine

1. AI as Auxiliary Aid: Generative AI used by a disabled person to access court processes should be treated as an auxiliary aid under ADA Title II, not as a cheat or a threat.
2. No Penalty for Using the Ramp: Disabled litigants should not be punished, mocked, or discredited for using AI to compensate for denied accommodations.
3. Evidence, Not Vibes: The doctrine is grounded in documented timelines, records, and filings, not in hypothetical fear stories about “AI replacing lawyers.”
4. Systems, Not Individuals: The problem is not autistic people, or any disabled person. The problem is systems designed around a narrow cognitive profile and then enforced as if that profile were neutral.

Implications for Courts and Public Entities

If courts and agencies take this seriously, several things follow:

• ADA coordinators must actively consider AI-based supports as potential accommodations.
• Courts must stop discrediting filings simply because a disabled person discloses that they used AI to structure or draft them.
• Procedural rules and communication practices must assume that some litigants will be accessing information through a cognitive interpreter, not directly from the source.

None of this is science fiction. It is already happening. The AI Ramp Doctrine simply names it and refuses to let it stay invisible.

Next Steps

This page is a starting point, not an endpoint. I expect scholars, disability advocates, technologists, and other disabled litigants to critique, refine, and expand this doctrine. That is the point.

If you work in law, accessibility, or AI ethics and want to reference or extend this work, you are welcome to do so. Please cite this archive as a primary source and, if you can, let me know where the doctrine ends up. I built this ramp because I needed it. If it helps someone else climb out of the same hole, it will have done its job.