Happy Valentine’s Day. The last few weeks have brought the usual assortment of cases, some of more interest than others. I’ll lead with a personal jurisdiction case that has the potential to be important for website accessibility lawsuits.
ADA Website Litigation – an important personal jurisdiction case.
Mercer v. Rampart Hotel Ventures, LLC, 2020 WL 236843 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 16, 2020) presents a familiar fact pattern. The disabled plaintiff purportedly visited the hotel website for a hotel in Louisiana. She was unable to find information about accessible rooms and therefore exited without trying to book a room. She then sued based on a violation of the ADA, whose regulations require such information, and under New York Law. The Court’s discussion of long arm jurisdiction should be immensely helpful to out-of-state defendants in website cases. The Court first rejected long arm jurisdiction based on a transaction between the plaintiff and defendant because defendant never tried to book a room. It then rejected an argument that other transactions between the hotel and citizens of New York were relevant, finding they were unconnected to the plaintiff’s claims. The next round of briefing in this case will be crucial, for the plaintiff was granted leave to amend to add a claim for personal jurisdiction based on the commission of tortious acts in New York. Courts commonly analogize ADA Title III claims when choosing a statute of limitations: “because most discrimination claims involve “injury to the individual rights of a person” and are analogous to personal injury tort claims. Meriwether v. ABC Training/Safety Council Texas Gulf Coast Chapter, 2016 WL 8711726, at *2 (N.D. Tex. Oct. 24, 2016), report and recommendation adopted, 2016 WL 8711279 (N.D. Tex. Nov. 18, 2016), but to say an ADA claim is analogous to a tort is not the same as saying it is a tort. Indeed, if it were, ADA violations could give rise to a state law action in tort. If the court rejects that notion that an ADA violation constitutes “tortious conduct” under the New York Long Arm Statute it may well become impossible for serial plaintiffs to fuel the ADA litigation machine with casual visits to websites of out-of-state hotels and other businesses.
On January 28, 2020 HUD issued its “Guidance on Reasonable Accommodations under the Fair Housing Act Relating to Assistance Animals.”† Over the course of 19 poorly written and poorly organized pages HUD provides one crumb of help for housing providers faced with bogus requests for emotional support animals. The bulk of the “Guidance” is a confused repetition of various earlier HUD positions that defy common sense and the law.
Just a quick note about some upcoming CLE opportunities, not all of them accessibility oriented. If you are wondering about the photo at left, it’s for something a little different. I’ll be presenting a one-hour webinar “Write Your Brief Like a Country Song: The Universal Rules of Effective Communication” for the University of Texas CLE program on January 24. You can find all the details at this link: “
Christmas is over with lumps of coal and sugar plums distributed in ways that often seem unrelated to who has been naughty or nice. Regular readers will see just how little has changed in the course of 2019 despite some important defense victories in the Sixth and Eight Circuits. With most ADA litigation centered in New York, California and Florida the serial litigation business will almost certainly continue to thrive in 2020.