Supreme Court to Consider Case of Litigious Disability Activist

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on March 23, 2023. Richard Moore/The Epoch Times

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging a serial lawsuit filer who has sued more than 600 hotels over their alleged failure to post disability accessibility information on their websites.

Activists say they are only helping to enforce the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which they say hotels do not observe unless they are pressured to do so.

Industry representatives counter that some activists abuse the Act and burden small businesses by lodging dubious lawsuits demanding disability accessibility information.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Resort Development Association, National Association of Home Builders, and International Council of Shopping Centers filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to review the case.

Burden to Small Businesses

“A cottage industry has arisen in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments.

“These lawsuits have burdened small businesses, clogged the judicial system, and undermined the Executive Branch’s exclusive authority to enforce federal law,” according to the petition that a hotel operator filed with the Supreme Court.

The court agreed in an unsigned order on March 27 to hear Acheson Hotels v. Laufer (court file 21-429). The court is expected to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October.

Deborah Laufer is a self-identified civil rights “tester” who challenges hotels’ failure to make information about accessibility to disabled people publicly available without necessarily intending to visit the supposedly offending hotels.

Hundreds of Lawsuits

Laufer, who has vision problems and physical disabilities, has brought hundreds of lawsuits against hotels across the country under the Disabilities Act, a 1990 civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

The ADA requires that hotels post information about their accessibility to people with disabilities.

Laufer brought suit in federal district court in Maine, claiming that the website for an inn that Acheson Hotels operates there contained insufficient information about what accommodations the establishment provides for disabled people.

The inn’s website states: “Please Note: Unfortunately, we do not have the capabilities to provide pet-friendly or ADA-compliant lodging. We apologize for the inconvenience!”

The district court sided with Acheson Hotels, holding that Laufer lacked legal standing to proceed because she did not actually intend to visit the hotel and therefore could not suffer harm because of the dearth of website information.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit disagreed and reinstated Laufer’s lawsuit, concluding that the denial of accessibility information was adequate grounds for the legal action.

The fact that “Laufer had no intent to use the information for anything but a lawsuit doesn’t change things,” the court stated.

Whatever “feelings of frustration, humiliation, and second-class citizenry” Laufer may have had are “downstream consequences” and “adverse effects” of the “informational injury she experienced,” according to the court.

Split Among Courts

There is a split among federal courts of appeal on the issue of tester standing.

Three have rejected tester standing on identical facts, while one held that Laufer’s allegations, if true, would establish standing, according to court documents.

The Epoch Times reached out to the hotel’s counsel of record, Adam Unikowsky of Jenner and Block, but had not received a reply as of press time.

But lawyers for the Restaurant Law Center, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the hotelier, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case.

“The Restaurant Law Center is very pleased that the Supreme Court has decided to review this matter,” attorneys Dylan Carp and Joseph DiPalma of Jackson Lewis told The Epoch Times by email.

“Merely resolving the circuit split that the case presents will bring needed clarity to the issue of tester standing, and precedent dictates that the Court will ultimately conclude that testers with no intent to patronize hospitality businesses lack standing to sue for alleged law violations,” they said.

Laufer’s attorney, Thomas Bacon, also lauded the High Court’s decision to hear the case.

“We are pleased that the Supreme Court will address a matter that has evenly divided the Circuits on the issue of whether decades of civil rights precedent remain intact or is effectively nullified by the Court’s recent decisions in Spokeo and TransUnion,” he told The Epoch Times by email.

In the two cases to which Bacon referred, the Supreme Court questioned the standing of testers to bring lawsuits.