A Supreme Court case about hotel websites could blow up much of US civil rights law::A case about hotel websites could blow up much of US civil rights law.
This is an interesting article, but why is it posted to c/technology?
Well it’s a bot posting so you’ll need to communicate in its native language.
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Why 13 ?
The ADA issues at play in the lawsuit largely stem from ADA claims against websites.
It’s a real issue where some small business makes a non-ADA compliant website and gets shaken down by sketchy law firms that hire disabled people to be straw plaintiffs (AKA “testers”) to find websites that are in violation.
From the article:
The ADA permits a plaintiff challenging a violation of this rule to obtain an injunction requiring a non-compliant hotel to fix its website, and it allows that plaintiff to have their attorney’s fees paid by the defendant if the plaintiff prevails in court. But the plaintiff may not obtain money damages if they prevail.
So some small business has to fix their website that the “tester” never would have used on their own, and they have to pay the law firm that hired the tester’s legal fees too. And then the law firm pays the tester.
The ADA is a pre-internet rule, and its enforcement mechanism and regulations around have never been updated for the digital age, so scummy lawyers are making a killing off it.
For the record, the solution is easy: update the ADA like disability advocates have been calling for ages.
What’s wrong with forcing them to fix their website? Accessible websites are good for everyone.
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!
