Something weird is going on in the U.S. Supreme Court. The six justices that comprise the majority—all conservatives, appointed by Republicans—have exhibited a small bit of common sense.
This extremist court has not shied away from curtailing people’s rights. So it was a surprise when last month, for the second time in the last year, they passed up an opportunity to trash the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
I’m kind of reluctant to write about this because I’m afraid I might jinx it. But write about it I must, so here goes:
On December 5, SCOTUS unanimously dismissed the case of Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer.
In 2020, Deborah Laufer filed a federal lawsuit against Coast Village Inn and Cottages in Wells, Maine, claiming its website omitted information about the accessibility of their facilities—like whether hotel doorways and bathrooms are accessible to people who use wheelchairs.
Acheson Hotels, the company that owned that property, failed to make simple changes to bring the website up to ADA compliance. Instead, the company’s lawyers challenged Laufer’s right to sue them under the ADA. While Laufer has both mobility and vision disabilities, Acheson’s lawyers contended that she had no right to sue them because she acknowledged that she had no actual intention of staying at Coast Village Inn. Laufer, however, is a civil rights “tester,” meaning she examines hotel websites to see if they are ADA compliant.
A federal district court ruled in favor of Acheson, but after an appeals court overturned that decision, Acheson took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In their petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case, Acheson alleged that Laufer had filed more than 600 ADA lawsuits against hotels.
But Laufer officially dropped the case in July. That prompted eighteen organizations that filed an amicus brief in support of Laufer to urge that the case be dismissed as moot. They hoped to avoid SCOTUS setting a ridiculous precedent that could limit the ability to use the ADA in court only to those directly harmed by specific acts of discrimination.
That’s exactly what the justices did. They dismissed the case, even though Acheson’s lawyers had urged them to rule anyway.
In June, SCOTUS also made the right decision in the case of Health and Hospital Corporations of Marion County v. Talevski.
In 2019, Ivanka Talevski filed a federal lawsuit against the owners of Valparaiso Care and Rehabilitation, a nursing home in Indiana on behalf of her now-deceased husband, Gorgi, who had been a resident. According to the lawsuit, Gorgi Talevski’s dementia worsened to the point where his family checked him into the facility in 2016.
At the time, Talevski could talk, feed himself, walk, socialize, and recognize his family. But soon, he became unable to eat on his own and started losing the ability to communicate in English, his second language. Thus, Ivanka Talevski filed the lawsuit against the home, and against Health and Hospital Corporation (HHC), which operates the facility. The suit charged that the facility violated Talevski’s rights under the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act because the staff who were supposed to take care of him used chemical restraints and medicated him to sleep rather than treating his dementia.
The defense tried to get the case dismissed by challenging the right of Talevski, or anybody else, to take legal action under that specific law. A lower court judge dismissed the case, a decision then reversed by the appeals court.
If the Supreme Court had sided with the hospital corporation, it would have meant that only the government could take action against nursing homes that violate the rights of their residents. (In other words, the decision would have curtailed the right of anybody but the government to assert federal laws designed to protect civil rights, like the ADA).
Fortunately, the Justices ruled 7-2 in Talevski’s favor. Of course, the dissenters were sourpusses Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
In the December ruling, even though Thomas concurred with the decision to dismiss Laufer’s case, he declared that he would’ve dismissed it because she lacked standing, as Acheson had argued.
So far, the burst of occasional common sense sweeping through SCOTUS hasn’t been overwhelming enough to penetrate Thomas’s thick skull. But for now, I’ll take these wins.