Earlier this year, it looked like the Supreme Court would deliver a death blow to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Acheson Hotels LLC had filed an appeals case against disability rights campaigner Deborah Laufer, who has filed hundreds of cases against hotels, including those aimed by Acheson, that she claims fail to disclose their accessibility information on their websites. The company filed suit because Laufer never planned on staying at the hotel and therefore, the company argued, she had no standing to file a complaint.
The case ended without the disability rights community taking what many feared would be a loss because he court ruled that the case was moot.
The case ended without the disability rights community taking what many feared would be a loss because Laufer withdrew her lawsuit and the court ruled that the case was moot.
Increasingly, conservative jurists have shown hostility toward private citizens filing lawsuits to preserve a protected group’s rights. Last month, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that only the federal government, not individuals or groups, can sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a position that would effectively render the section meaningless. The ADA has no federal agency dedicated to enforcing the law, meaning it relies on private citizens filing lawsuits.
A ruling for Acheson would have significantly curtailed the ability of “testers” to file lawsuits through the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is one of the main ways that the law is enforced. The practice is fairly common. Organizations that seek to expose housing discrimination, for example, use testers. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that fair housing testers could sue under the Fair Housing Act, even if they never intended to purchase or rent a property.
While some companies have argued that it’s unfair to let testers file suits against establishments they never plan on using, people with disabilities say that testers benefit the community as a whole since people with disabilities can use these facilities in the future.
When the Supreme Court made its Dobbs v. Jackson ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, I warned in this space that the Americans with Disabilities Act could be next on the chopping block. The justices that former President Donald Trump nominated had shown incredible hostility to disability rights in their previous decisions. And Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the dissenting opinion in the landmark Olmstead v LC ruling, which found that unjustified segregation of people with disabilities violated the law, remains on the court.
But the Supreme Court surprised many when it sidestepped the question Tuesday, electing not to decide whether Laufer had standing. Laufer’s attorney had his law license suspended, and Laufer voluntarily dismissed her suit.
In Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s unanimous opinion for the court, she wrote, “We are sensitive to Acheson’s concern about litigants manipulating the jurisdiction of this Court. We are not convinced, however, that Laufer abandoned her case in an effort to evade our review. She voluntarily dismissed her pending ADA cases after a lower court sanctioned her lawyer.”
Acheson had wanted the Supreme Court to rule despite Laufer backing out of the case. But, again, the court decided the case was moot and, thus, spared us a ruling that could have been disastrous for disabled Americans.
Tuesday was just the latest example of people with disabilities dodging a bullet from this conservative Supreme Court.
Tuesday was just the latest example of people with disabilities dodging a bullet from this conservative Supreme Court. In March, in what was a surprise unanimous decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has previously ruled against people with disabilities, the Supreme Court ruled that a deaf student who’d sued in a case demanding sign language interpreters under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act could still bring a case under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In a case that raised the question of whether people could sue Medicaid when state programs aren’t properly administered, Susie Talevski, who says her late father was mistreated in an Indiana care facility, told Sara Luterman at The 19th News that people warned her that she would lose the case and that her loss would weaken people with disabilities’ ability to file lawsuits.
But with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the majority opinion for the court, the court ruled 7-2 that such lawsuits could proceed, causing a massive sigh of relief from those of us who feared the court would rule the opposite way.
After Tuesday’s decision, there might be some who say the Supreme Court is not as bad as disability advocates have said, or argue that the court has shown itself to be in favor of people with disabilities. But in the Talevski case, it did not rule that there was an ADA violation, only that Talevski’s lawsuit could proceed. And in the case of the deaf student, the court didn’t go as far as disability rights activists wanted.
It’s clear that Tuesday's decision doesn’t mean the ADA is safe.
“We emphasize, however, that we might exercise our discretion differently in a future case,” Barrett wrote. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “I would not dismiss this case as moot. There is no question that we have authority to address Laufer’s standing.”
It’s clear that Tuesday's decision doesn’t mean the ADA is safe.
This means that in a potential future case that doesn’t involve a lawyer losing his license, the court might easily rule in favor of a company that argues that you have to actually book a room at a hotel before you have the standing to argue that it’s violated the ADA.
Given the court’s rulings that have negatively impacted Black people, women and LGBTQ people, it seems clear that it will only be so long until this court trains its crosshairs on the laws that protect disabled people.
CORRECTION (Dec. 8, 2023, 10:00 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated the status of Laufer’s attorney’s law license. It was suspended, not lost.