Kim Brown-Hunter v. Carolyn W. Colvin

ORDER

The court’s opinion filed August 4, 2015, and appearing at 798 F.3d 749 (9th Cir. 2015), is hereby amended. An amended opinion is filed herewith.

With this amended opinion, the panel has voted to deny the petition for panel rehearing. That petition is therefore DENIED. No further petitions for rehearing or rehearing en banc may be filed.

AMENDED OPINION

When an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) determines that a claimant for Social Security benefits is not malingering and has provided objective medical evidence of an underlying impairment which might reasonably produce the pain or other symptoms she alleges, the ALJ may reject the claimant’s testimony about the severity of those symptoms only by providing specific, clear, and convincing reasons for doing so. We hold that an ALJ does not provide specific, clear, and convincing reasons for rejecting a claimant’s testimony by simply reciting the medical evidence in support of his or her residual functional capacity determination. To ensure that our review of the ALJ’s credibility determination is meaningful, and that the claimant’s testimony is not rejected arbitrarily, we require the ALJ to specify which testimony she finds…