The U.S. Supreme Court will decide if a group of blind people may sue Labcorp for discrimination because the company’s new self-service check-in kiosks were not accessible to them.
The petitioner does business with the public as Labcorp. The respondents are blind Labcorp patients, including Luke Davis and Julian Vargas.
The company began offering self-service kiosks at its patient service centers, but blind individuals could not access them without help.
To make things easier for the blind, “LabCorp improved its front-desk services at the same time—incorporating the same ‘express’ technology it uses in its kiosks—to ensure that blind patients have a similarly easy check-in option there,” the petition states.
In 2020, a group of legally blind people filed a putative—or proposed—class action lawsuit, claiming that the kiosks ran afoul of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.
In a class action, one or more plaintiffs sue on behalf of a “class,” or a larger group of people who claim to have suffered the same injury because of a defendant. Federal and state court rules govern whether a class action gets certified and is allowed to proceed.
Labcorp claims that not all blind people in the class actually experienced injuries as a result of the company’s policies.
In its order, the Supreme Court said it would consider whether federal civil procedure rules allow a federal court to certify a class action “when some members of the proposed class lack any Article III injury.”
Article III of the U.S. Constitution governs federal courts and has been interpreted as stating that those courts may only hear cases involving actual controversies in which at least one litigant has standing to sue.
Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify their participation in a lawsuit.
Labcorp stated in the petition that “it is very hard to find blind patients actually harmed by the availability of LabCorp’s new kiosks.”
Many blind patients “either do not know these kiosks exist or, if they did, have zero interest in using them, preferring instead to use the front-desk option that has served them well for years.”
Moreover, the other side could not point to any patients who could not avail themselves of Labcorp’s services because they could not access a kiosk, according to the petition.
The plaintiffs in the original lawsuit defined the proposed classes as “all blind patients who had been merely exposed to these allegedly unlawful kiosks—i.e., blind patients who had walked into a [patient service center] with a kiosk, regardless of whether they knew about or wanted to use it.”
The plaintiffs said this meant the classes could number as many as hundreds of thousands of people and could lead to about half a billion dollars per year in damages, the petition states.
In May 2022, a federal district court certified two classes in the lawsuit. One class consisted of patients in California seeking damages under the Unruh Act; the other class consisted of patients across the country seeking relief under the ADA and two other federal statutes—the Rehabilitation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s health care law, also known as Obamacare.
The company urged the Supreme Court to grant the petition, arguing that the federal courts of appeals are divided on what should be done when some class members lack any injury under Article III. In addition, the case “implicates billions of dollars.”
They said the lower courts did not find that a class containing uninjured members may be certified. Instead, the courts ruled “that every member of the certified classes maintained that they had experienced a common injury and that ‘all class members were injured by the complete inaccessibility of LabCorp kiosks for blind individuals.’”
The Ninth Circuit was correct in ruling “that all class members were subjected to unfavorable treatment by Labcorp on account of their disability,” the brief states.
One of the respondents’ attorneys, Nicolas Sansone of Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington, declined to comment.
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to LabCorp’s attorney, Noel Francisco of Jones Day in Washington. No reply was received by publication time.
