The Supreme Court has said that before a plaintiff can file suit in federal court he or she must have suffered a “concrete and particularized” injury. The requirement is constitutional and comes from the case and controversy clause in Article III. For statutory claims like those under the ADA this means an injury of the kind the statute was intended to prevent. The rise of ADA website lawsuits has caused some courts to take a look at just what injury the ADA was intended to prevent. Was the ADA intended to prevent those with disabilities from suffering some dignitary harm based on the mere knowledge that discriminatory conditions exist, or does it require real discrimination in access to goods and services? More
Accessibility Litigation Trends
Best blog anyone?
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends Tags: ADA defense, Best Legal Blog, Expert Institute, FHA Defense
Accessibility Defense has once again been nominated for the Expert Institute’s Best Legal Blog competition. If you agree that this is useful tool for you please go ahead and vote for us, which you can do at this link: Vote for Accessibility Defense.
Quick Hits – First pre-Christmas Edition
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA - serial litigation, ADA Attorney's Fees, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA Litigation Procedure, ADA Point of Sale, ADA Policies, ADA Web Access, FHA Tags: ADA Credit Union, ADA default judgment, ADA Mootness, ADA Policies, ADA service counters, Point of Sale, Starbucks
If you’re not all in, you need to get out quickly. That seems to be a theme that runs through many of this week’s roundup of recent decisions. As we will see several times below, ADA lawsuits generally require a decision to surrender or fight to the death at the beginning of the case. Anything usually results in money wasted on attorneys’ fees. That said, defendants continue to succeed in some cases, justifying a close look at the particular court and its history before making a decision on how to proceed. More
Quick Hits – Recent ADA and FHA Cases
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA - drive-by litigation, ADA - serial litigation, ADA - Standing, ADA Attorney's Fees, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA Litigation Procedure, ADA Mootness, ADA Point of Sale, ADA Vending Machines, ADA Web Access, FHA, FHA Reasonable Accommodation, Internet, Internet Accessibility Tags: ADA defense, ADA Mootness, ADA standing, FHA Defense, Readily Achievable, WCAG 2.0, website accessibility
We aren’t quite to Halloween, but the candy is certainly crowding the shelves of local stores, whose owners might want to take a look at Ryan v. Kohls, Inc., discussed below. Beyond that we have the usual roundup of default judgment cases, website accessibility standing cases, and of course some ordinary “drive-by” cases involving physical accessibility mixed in with cases that deserve special attention because they could have a broad impact on ADA and FHA litigation. Here they are. More
Good news for FHA defendants – accessibility matters more than numbers.
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, Design Build Discrimination, FHA, FHA design/build litigation, FHA Regulation, Multi-Family Tags: design/build litigation, Fair Housing Act defense, FHA Design Manual, FHA safe harbors, Miami Valley, Mid-America, Section 3604(f)(3)(C)
The decision in Miami Valley Fair Hous. Ctr., Inc. v. Preferred Living Real Est. Investments, LLC, 2018 WL 4690790 (S.D. Ohio Sept. 28, 2018) has the potential to create a significant change in how FHA design/build cases are litigated. It also provides litigants with a treatise on the most important evidentiary issues faced by both plaintiffs and defendants. The critical take-away for apartment owners and developers is that proof of deviations from the various FHA safe harbors is not conclusive evidence of an FHA violation. That means defendants who own or build apartments that are accessible but have technical deviations from FHA design/build safe harbors will be given the chance to talk about what matters to the disabled, that is, accessibility. More