The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments on October 4 involving a case that could blow a gaping hole in the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).
In 2020, Deborah Laufer filed a federal lawsuit charging the Coast Village Inn and Cottages in Wells, Maine, with an ADA violation. The hotel’s website left out information on their website 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 address the complaint. Instead, the company’s lawyers challenged Laufer’s right to sue them under the ADA. Laufer has both mobility and vision disabilities, but Acheson’s lawyers contended that she had no right to sue them because she had no intention of staying at Coastal Village Inn and Cottages. Laufer, however, is a civil rights “tester,” meaning she examines hotel websites to see if they are ADA compliant and have enough accessibility information for disabled people to know if they can stay there.
A federal district court ruled in favor of Acheson, but an appeals court overturned that decision, allowing Acheson to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
In their petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case, Acheson said that Laufer had filed more than 600 ADA lawsuits against hotels. It decried the emergence of the “cottage industry” in which disabled people file multiple lawsuits against businesses and extract settlement money from them. “It clogs the courts with lawsuits and diverts focus from the claims of plaintiffs who were actually harmed,” the petition said.
For disabled folks, seeing all this noncompliance hurts. It makes us feel like some stubborn vestiges still exist of the deep disregard for disabled people that the ADA was supposed to eradicate.
Personally, I feel more threatened by corporations like Acheson that clog up the courts with their back door attempt to undermine the ADA. They do this under the pretense of launching a great crusade to preserve the integrity of the law by fighting against those who assert it often.
Let’s all remember that the ADA was signed into law more than thirty-three years ago. And yet, there is still enough noncompliance out there to fund the so-called cottage industry through multiple profitable lawsuits. For disabled folks, seeing all this noncompliance hurts. It makes us feel like some stubborn vestiges still exist of the deep disregard for disabled people that the ADA was supposed to eradicate, even after all these years.
It’s an insult to all disabled people for Acheson to try to get the Supreme Court to affirm that if one doesn’t intend to do business with an entity, it doesn’t matter whether it is in compliance.
One of the most beautiful things about the ADA is that anyone can try to enforce it by filing a lawsuit. You’re not at the mercy of the whim of federal agencies to take action. But if Acheson prevails, the power of individuals to use the ADA could be significantly diminished.
No matter what happens from here, Laufer’s case will not go forward. She has already dropped the underlying lawsuit and the website of the Coast Village Inn and Cottages has been updated to be ADA compliant. Acheson no longer owns that property.
Acheson could have dropped the case, too. So when the company continued to press this case, it couldn’t creditably claim to be defending itself. It’s simply trying to undermine the ADA.