On Wednesday October 4 the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case about who can file a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case is called Acheson Hotels vs. Deborah Laufer.

Ms. Laufer is a disabled woman. She uses a wheelchair and has a vision impairment and limited use of her hands. She sued because when she visited the Acheson Hotels website she found it was in violation of a part of the ADA that requires hotels to post online information about its hotel rooms’ accessibility features. This information is essential to disabled travelers across the United States.

The case is not about whether the Acheson website is accessible, but the Supreme Court Opinion, not expected until 2024, may impact lawsuits filed about whether a website is accessible to disabled people.

Audio recordings and transcripts of the US Supreme Court argument in this case should be available on the court’s website on October 4.

• Visit the audio recordings page for U.S. Supreme Court arguments
• Visit the transcript page for U.S. Supreme Court arguments

What is this case about?

In the United States, a person cannot just file a lawsuit whenever they encounter something they do not like. A person has to have “standing to sue” to file the case. Standing means you have to be harmed by a problem you encountered and are trying to remedy.

Deborah Laufer is what is known as a civil rights tester: she did not intend to visit the Acheson Hotel, but instead she was testing its website to see if Acheson complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for posting hotel accessibility information.

In the United States, there is a long legal history saying that civil rights testers have standing to sue. This history recognizes that testing for violation of civil rights laws (like the ADA) and filing lawsuits when discrimination is found, is crucial to enforcing those laws. Testers, for example, have been critical in enforcing laws designed to prohibit landlords and homeowners from discriminating against Black people wanting to secure housing. (Read about testers and Martin Luther King’s role in fair housing advocacy.)

This legal history recognizes too that civil rights testers experience the type of harm that is required to file a lawsuit.

In this case, Deborah Laufer stated that she experienced “frustration and humiliation” and a “sense of isolation and segregation” when she discovered that Acheson Hotels did not provide the information required by the ADA. She also stated that she felt she was “treated like a second class citizen” when she could not get the required accessibility information from the website. This type of impact, known as “dignitary harm” has long been the type of harm that standing law requires.

This is a very early stage of the case — the Court will be deciding only if it go forward or should it be thrown out. It is not about who will ultimately win or lose the case. It is not about whether there are too many ADA lawsuits, or even whether Ms. Laufer herself has filed too many lawsuits. At this stage of the case the court must consider her court pleadings to be true.

As the lawyers for the disability community wrote in a brief, the court should only be deciding “whether a disabled person who pled that she experienced “frustration and humiliation” and a “sense of isolation and segregation” upon finding required accessibility information absent from a hotel’s reservations service has alleged an injury-in-fact sufficient to establish standing at the motion-to-dismiss stage.”

The outpouring of support for the rights of testers to file discrimination lawsuits from prominent organizations across the civil right spectrum (see links below) demonstrates the importance of tester standing to make sure civil rights laws in this country are enforced. The Supreme Court’s eventual opinion on standing in this case may impact web accessibility cases too. We’ll have to wait and see.

Learn more about this case

Many “Friends of the Court” briefs (officially called Amicus Briefs) were filed in support of Deborah Laufer’s right to bring this lawsuit as a civil rights tester. These include the following

• Disability community brief: This brief was filed by eighteen well respected disability rights organizations including the Disability rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD). The full list of supporting organizations can be found on the last page of the brief.
• Brief submitted by Massachusetts and 8 other states. This brief in support of civil rights tester standing was filed by Massachusetts, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington. The brief begins with the statement that these states “share sovereign and compelling interests in protecting people with disabilities from discrimination within our borders.”
• Brief submitted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and 8 other civil rights organizations. This brief was filed by “civil rights organizations committed to the effective enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and the preservation of access to the courts for victims of discrimination.” In addition to the NAACP LDF the organizations include Howard University School of Law Civil Rights Clinic, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (“Lambda Legal”) and the National Women’s Law Center.

Civil rights lawsuits are essential to the legal framework in the United States that prohibits discrimination based on disability, race, gender, and more. And civil rights tester standing, as these briefs so carefully explain, is critical to that framework. I appreciate the principled (and excellent) work done by the lawyers who wrote these amicus briefs to protect the long history of civil rights enforcement in this country.