Supported Independence
A Framework for the Law and Life We Have Not Yet Built

The concept of Supported Independence is developed at greater length in "What Will the Law Do When You Can No Longer Stand Alone?", published in Voice of Experience, the monthly newsletter of the American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division, in a special Rule of Law issue published just before the Fourth of July — the nation's 250th anniversary.

The law protects autonomy well when it assumes a fully capable adult operating at full capacity. That assumption covers a narrower slice of human experience than the law likes to admit.

Disability does not observe a schedule. It may be present from birth, arrive through illness or injury, or accumulate gradually with age. Dependency is not an exception to the human condition. It is part of it — at the beginning of life, at its end, and at unpredictable points in between. And when dependency arrives, what determines whether a person retains their legal personhood is rarely the law alone. It is whether the supports surrounding them — family, community, healthcare, housing, coordinated services — are strong enough to make substitution unnecessary.

This is the upstream truth that guardianship reform has been slow to absorb: most guardianships are not inevitable. They are the downstream consequence of systems that failed to coordinate in time. A person who has adequate care navigation, financial management assistance, a trusted network, and access to community-based services rarely ends up in a courtroom having their rights transferred to a stranger. The legal system enters when the life systems have already failed.

When the life systems fail and the legal system enters, it reaches, too often, for its most powerful instrument first. Substituted judgment — the court-ordered transfer of a person’s legal agency to someone else — is not a support. It is a replacement. It does not ask what the person needs in order to remain the author of their own life. It asks who should make decisions instead. Once that transfer occurs, it can be extraordinarily difficult to reverse: the person who has lost legal agency is also the person least positioned to reclaim it.

Supported decision-making offers a less drastic alternative — a person retains their rights but receives structured assistance in exercising them. By definition, it is about decisions: the specific acts of choosing, consenting, directing. It is not designed to address the broader conditions that make autonomous living possible — the relationships, the daily supports, the housing stability, the care navigation, the web of trust that allows a person to remain who they are across time, not only at the moment a decision must be made. In a majority of states it is now on the books as a less restrictive option, and it is a genuine improvement over substituted judgment. But its scope is the transaction, not the person.

Neither instrument addresses the upstream failure that made legal intervention necessary. Neither begins with what the person retains. Neither asks what scaffolding would allow them to remain who they are. That is the gap supported independence is designed to fill — not as a new legal mechanism, but as the standard against which every mechanism should be measured.

Supported independence is the framework that goes further.

It begins where the disability rights movement began: with the recognition that the problem is often not the person but the environment — and that vulnerability is not a reason to reduce rights but a reason to reinforce them. It holds that the law’s obligation is to supply scaffolding without confiscating sovereignty. That assistance and autonomy are not opposites. That the people and institutions surrounding a vulnerable person are part of their legal personhood, not a reason to extinguish it.

Supported Independence is not a statute. It is not a mechanism. It is a promise — that human dignity does not expire with age or disability, and that the law’s obligation at moments of vulnerability is to honor the person rather than replace them.

It asks the questions the current system too rarely asks: What does this person retain? What do they value? What supports would allow them to exercise their own judgment, rather than have it replaced? And what justification exists — specific, functional, and reviewable — for any restriction that remains?

These are not new questions. They are the questions that due process has always asked in other contexts. Supported independence asks them here.

About This Site

This site collects work at the intersection of aging, elder justice, and law — from the upstream conditions that make guardianship the path of least resistance, to the federal enforcement tools that exist to prosecute those who exploit it.

Guardianship has long been present in elder justice as backdrop, cautionary example, and occasion for incremental reform. What it has not been, until recently, is the lens through which the field evaluates its own commitments. That is what this work proposes to make it.

The writing here spans constitutional analysis, investigative journalism, policy advocacy, and the argument that guardianship is not a solution but a failure condition — the downstream endpoint of care systems, housing systems, and support networks that did not coordinate in time. When those systems are strengthened, guardianship should not need to be reformed. It should become rare, and eventually obsolete. The science of aging — including the ageism that normalizes diminishment before the law ever enters the room — runs through all of it. Supported independence is the promise against which the whole system can be measured.

Where to Begin

The case for Supported Independence is built from work already collected on this site. These are the best starting points:

On the constitutional failure: Guardianship and the Constitution: A System in Violation: The due process and equal protection argument for why the current system cannot meet the standard supported independence proposes.

On the legal architecture of dignity: Law as the Architecture of Human Dignity — A constitutional briefing examining guardianship as a systemic rights failure.

On appellate deference: Deference Without Due Process — A legislative briefing for the New York Assembly and Senate Committees on Aging, Disability, and Judiciary. This briefing shows how appellate courts compound the due process failure by deferring to proceedings that lack the basic attributes of lawful adjudication.

On systemic accountability failure: Adult Guardianship as a Due-Process and Accountability Failure — A companion to Deference Without Due Process, this appendix addresses the structural reality: why the cases that most warrant appellate correction are the least able to obtain it — and why legislators, not courts, must close the gap.

On the upstream conditions — aging and ageism: Ageism and Aging — The science of aging and the cultural forces that normalize diminishment before the law enters the room. The pipeline begins here, long before a court is involved.

On the upstream conditions — the pipeline itself: The Guardianship Pipeline — How crisis, institutional convenience, and the absence of coordinated support convert vulnerability into legal capture. Understanding the pipeline is the precondition for understanding why supported independence is necessary.

For the elder justice community: The Reckoning — Elder justice has made genuine progress on prevention, coordination, and rights-based reform. This section asks the harder question: whether the field’s commitments are adequate to the standard supported independence proposes — and what it would mean to say yes. Supported independence is offered here not as a critique of the field’s work but as its logical destination.

Forthcoming

Supported Independence — its promise and its framework — is introduced in a forthcoming publication in Voice of Experience, the American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division newsletter. That article will be posted here upon publication, in June 2026.

Further development of supported independence as a constitutional standard, a policy framework, and a measure of a mature aging society appears throughout the work collected on this site. 

Image: Box-Death Hollow Wilderness, Escalante, UT