A Supreme Court case about hotel websites could blow up much of US civil rights law
The Supreme Court hears a civil rights case straight out of a right-wing fever dream
My father in law was the target of these type of shitty lawsuits. He is a farmer who got tired of buying seed every year, so he bought a local seed company. He just sells to the other farmers in his region. They asked him to set up a website so they can order from there. Not even six months after seeing up the website he gets sued in federal court by a blind guy living in New York city for his website not being ADA compliant.
I looked up the plaintiff, he had dozens of these suits, all targeting small seed businesses that sell primarily to farmers. He had the same lawyers on every suit as well. Highly unlikely a guy living in NYC is doing a lot of farming. This was just using the courts to extort small businesses.
Now you have a similar scheme targeting small hotels that could erase protections for those that actually need them, all to extort money.
What ended up happening with the lawsuit?
I don't have all the details, this is just my understanding. Fortunately, my father in law had a good lawyer and a sympathetic judge. The lawyer had him pay a guy $300 to make the website compliaint, then they presented the changes and story (father in law has glaucoma) to the judge who agreed that the results should satisfy the plaintiff. I do know that my father in law sent a sample of their most popular seed products to the plaintiff after the case. Most are not suitable for "home growing," lol.
The real problem is that the ADA has no mechanism of enforcement except lawsuits. There's no ADA regulators out there, the way there are for food safety for instance. At least in my city, the restaurant inspectors work with the restaurants to get them up to food safety compliance, which is good for everyone. If that kind of structure had been built into the ADA, your friend's website would have been accessible from the start, or easily fixed, because during these decades a market would have been created for the necessary software. (And a person in a wheelchair wouldn't have to enter so many restaurants by pushing past the dumpsters and toilets and wheeling through the kitchen, which tends to dull the appetite, btw.) Instead the market has been created for assholes to exploit small businesses with frivolous lawsuits and very little benefit has gone to people with disabilities.
All this stems from the US' general aversion to awarding costs.
Costs shouldn't be awarded all the time, but in the most egregious cases they definitely should. It shouldn't cost the victim of a frivilous lawsuit to represent themselves in court, they should get that back from the party that filed, after the lawsuit is ruled frivilous. Similarly, costs shouldn't always be awarded when the defendent is convicted, particularly if there are certain mitigating circumstances.
If the US had a general mechanism for awarding costs to the defendent of a frivilous lawsuit, rather than just specific circumstances, then a lot of this bullshit wouldn't happen.
All this stems from the US’ general aversion to
awarding costsproper regulation.
FTFY. As other comments have pointed out, why is it that individuals have to sue for damages when in civilized countries there are regulators to enforce compliance?
About halfway through, when vox.com started explaining in all earnestness that the problem with the ADA is that it doesn't offer enough opportunities for lawyers to get paid big bucks, I felt I was going crazy. Is this real life?
The line between greed and malevolence is a blurry one indeed.
The very cool comments here that are totally for the protections of ADA if only it weren’t for the crummy enforcement mechanisms belie the fact that these protections are vitally important. The only reason I can reliably book a hotel is because these rooms exist and they’re advertised that way on the website. If we’re to have a system where we can only book hotels online and we want to protect vulnerable people, this is the only way we have to do it right now.
Absent changes to how businesses can have these complaints enforced on them, denying this remedy means we will not protect these people, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise
Dude, literally nobody here is calling for the abolishment of the ADA "and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise." What they are complaining about is how easy it is to abuse reporting, which hurts both the business serving a market and the people who the ADA is designed to help.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The defendants are typically small hotels, and Laufer accuses them of failing to comply with a federal regulation requiring that they disclose on their websites whether their rooms are accessible to people with disabilities.
One, Tristan Gillespie, was suspended from the bar of that same Maryland court, in large part because of a scheme where he would use Laufer’s cases to squeeze money out of these hotels for work that he never did.
It involves a perennial plaintiff and lawyers who appear to have profited from a scheme to shake down small business owners — at least one of whom, Gillespie, is the subject of a blistering federal court opinion disciplining him for unethical behavior.
But, in the worst-case scenario for civil rights advocates, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans may not only shut down Laufer’s vast array of lawsuits.
But there is, at least, a real risk that a majority of the justices are so angered by Laufer’s blizzard of lawsuits, and by the behavior of some of her lawyers, that they hand down a far-too-sweeping decision cutting off many meritorious challenges to discrimination.
As Laufer’s current legal team argues in its brief to the Supreme Court, “because Title III[ of the ADA’s] private cause of action is limited to injunctive relief, suing to enforce the Reservation Rule is essentially useless to a disabled traveler who encounters a noncompliant reservation website while looking for a room based on imminent travel plans, as no injunction could be entered in time to help.” Laufer says that, as a tester, she hopes to mitigate this problem by pressuring hotels to fix their websites in advance.
The original article contains 2,705 words, the summary contains 274 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The fact that ADA enforcement is through private action (and not, say, a government function like health, building-code, or fire-safety inspection) is unfortunate. It makes shitty lawyers (like the ones in this case) the face of the ADA.
schemes like this targeting small businesses have been going on since the ada was passed. crooked, predatory lawyers actively go out and find 'testers' (aka 'future plaintiffs') and then split any proceeds with them (from attorneys fees collected, which is the only thing they can get awarded).
Yes, it's truly gross.
I don't think people should be profiteering significantly off of stuff like this, but I do think ADA compliant websites should exist. Why alienate people with vision issues just so you don't need to build a website that has appropriate descriptions of your website elements?
It's one of those things when threatened someone should have to fix or otherwise get a not-insignificant fine scaled appropriately based on revenue if they don't fix it.
You don't need paid education or significant experience to modify html and css to include the appropriate information. There's even some free testing tools out there which will tell you about things that are problems.
The upside to private actions being allowed here is that you could have a nonprofit going around doing this for people, or even an individual trying to do the right thing. With the volume of ada-noncompliant websites out there I don't think a government entity could keep up without efficient organization and automated tooling - both things I don't really trust the government to do.
That's a different case from the one in the article -- which isn't about whether the website is accessible to blind users, but whether the website contains statements about whether the rooms are accessible to mobility-impaired guests.
But in both cases, it seems like something similar to fire-safety inspections or health inspections would suffice. Where I live, fire protection systems (alarms, sprinklers, etc.) are inspected annually. Restaurants are regularly inspected for health code violations, and (importantly) can be re-inspected if a customer reports that they saw unsanitary conditions.
It's just another checklist item. Check the fire alarms work; check there aren't roaches in the kitchen; check the website mentions accessible rooms.