The Supreme Court will consider the strength of the Americans with Disabilities Act on Wednesday when it hears a dispute over whether a self-appointed “tester” of the civil rights law has the right to sue hotels over alleged violations of its provisions.
How the justices rule could have a significant impact on the practical effectiveness of the landmark legislation, which aims to shield individuals with disabilities from discrimination in public accommodations and a host of other settings.
At the center of the dispute is Deborah Laufer, a disability rights advocate who has brought hundreds of lawsuits against hotels she says are not in compliance with ADA rules requiring hotels to disclose information about how accessible they are to individuals with disabilities.
Laufer, a Florida resident who uses a wheelchair and has a visual impairment, doesn’t intend to visit the hotels she’s suing. Instead, the complaints are made in an effort to force the hotels to update their websites to be in compliance with the law. Legal experts say the strategy, known as “testing,” is necessary to ensure enforcement of the historic law.
There’s a simple protection against this sort of trolling: Comply with the ADA.
She seems to go after tiny independent hotels, you know, the ones who barely have a website…
It’s not like she’s complaining about lack of ramps or actual accommodations, she’s literally suing them over what their website doesn’t say.
Seriously, this is a bit of a rabbit hole, and the more you read about it, the worse she looks.
Tiny independent hotels should still comply with the ADA. I’m not saying she’s not a troll, but the means to defeat her is doing the bare minimum as required by law. In this case, the lawsuit was dropped and the decision rendered moot once the hotel updated their website to say that they don’t offer ADA-compliant accomodations. And if she was filing nuisance suits, 32 different states have anti-SLAPP laws.
Do tiny independent hotels not have to comply with ADA rules? Do they get exceptions for having a noncompliant website? Whatever her motives are doesn’t matter, because what she’s doing is good for society, the ADA, and helps keep business in check. The easy solution for these hotels is to just do things right up front and not put themselves in a position to get sued.
No, the easy solution is funding our government so they can hold businesses accountable…
Stop trying to privatize regulation, it pretty much never works out the way it should.
Both can exist. If there was a way to report the business to a government entity that then held the offenders liable, that would be ideal. Skip court, the business remedy the situation, the lady gets all of the changes complete. Either way, what she’s doing is a good thing and this is the best avenue to get results, and it’s working.
This is quite literally why we have the rights we have. Stop trying to hand government all the power. We can have both but we need at least one means to actually be effective.