US Supreme Court mulls limiting disability bias lawsuits

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday raised concerns about lawsuits targeting hotels and other places of lodging for omitting details in their reservation systems about accessibility features for people with disabilities, but indicated they might opt not to decide the case.

The justices heard arguments in an appeal by Acheson Hotels of a lower court’s ruling that let a Florida woman pursue a lawsuit against the company in Maine even though she had no plans to stay at a hotel the company owned there.

Plaintiff Deborah Laufer, who is visually impaired and uses a wheelchair, is a self-described “tester” of hotel compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. The landmark civil rights law protects people with disabilities from discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, as well as areas including employment, transportation, communications and access to public programs and services.

To have proper legal standing to sue in federal court, plaintiffs typically must show they have been concretely harmed in a way that may entitle them to a court-ordered remedy. At issue before the Supreme Court was whether Laufer has such standing.

“Tell me how she is discriminated against by the inaccuracies on this website” when Laufer has disclaimed using the reservation service to book at the hotel, liberal Justice Elena Kagan asked Laufer’s attorney, Kelsi Corkran.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Laufer did not “personally experience the discrimination” herself.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson evoked a chapter of the Civil Rights movement in which Black Americans staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters to defy segregation in protests that gave rise to litigation. But Jackson asked Corkran if her client was more like a Black lawyer from that era who observes discrimination at a distance but “never goes to the counter to ask himself for the food.”

President Joe Biden’s administration agreed with the hotel in the case that Laufer does not have standing in the case to sue.

While the arguments explored Laufer’s legal standing, the justices also tried to determine whether they should rule in the case at all, given that both sides have said the underlying dispute is moot.

Laufer dropped her lawsuit as well as others she filed after one of her attorneys in a separate case was disciplined by a lower court for ethics violations. In addition, the hotel at issue in the case, Coast Village Inn and Cottages in Wells, Maine, has since modified its website to include accessibility information. The inn was operated by Acheson at the time of the lawsuit but it is now under different ownership.

“The case before us is dead as a doornail,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito told Adam Unikowsky, a lawyer for Acheson.

Kagan appeared to agree.

“This is, like, dead, dead, dead – in all the ways that something can be dead,” Kagan said.

Laufer sued in 2020, claiming that the hotel’s omissions violated a 2010 Justice Department regulation requiring reservation systems to include accessibility information.

A federal judge in Maine threw out the lawsuit, finding Laufer did not have standing, but the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year revived the case.

Laufer has filed more than 600 similar lawsuits after searching for websites of hotels that do not provide enough information about whether their rooms are accessible under the ADA.

Business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have said ADA “testers” have been fueling an explosion in lawsuits against small businesses accused of discriminating against disabled people.