I’m the last of the ADA bloggers to discuss Laufer v Looper, 21-1031, 2022 WL 39072, at *6 (10th Cir. Jan. 5, 2022) but reading the analysis by Bill Goren (Is Tester Standing a Thing When it Comes to Title III of the ADA) and Seyfarth Shaw (A Status Update on Hotel Reservations Website Lawsuits) has given me some perspective on what the decision means for tester standing in ADA and FHA cases. I think the discussion of tester standing in Laufer v. Looper exposes the fatal flaw in all tester standing cases; that is, testers never suffer the kind of injury that is now required by the Supreme Court to meet the requirements of Article III. Like Yorick, a fellow of infinite jest who bore young Hamlet a thousand times, tester standing should be dead (5).
FHA standing
Tester standing under the ADA – Getting it wrong, getting it right, and an interesting but irrelevant analysis.
Three cases in the last thirty days look at ADA standing and reach different conclusions about what the Constitution and the ADA require. For victims of serial litigation and for courts interested in the coherent application of the text of the ADA and similar statutes these are crucial cases.² More
ADA Policies – You’ve got to walk the walk part II
On March 5, 2015 the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in one of the longest running ADA lawsuits around. Chapman v. Pier 1 Imports (U.S.) Inc., 2015 WL 925586 (9th Cir. Mar. 5, 2015). Like the Home Depot case I wrote about a few weeks ago the issue in Chapman v. Pier 1 concerned obstructions that blocked access and a policy that was supposed to prevent such obstructions. Unlike Home Depot, Chapman v. Pier 1 includes some clear guidelines for businesses that want to make sure they are “walking the walk.”
Standing for serial plaintiffs – it’s a legal issue, not a moral problem
Accessibility litigation under the ADA and FHA always seems to have a moral component. This is partly because plaintiffs almost always preface their complaints with a lengthy and unnecessary recitation of Congressional intent about the ADA and FHA, frequently accompanied by statistics about the number of disabled Americans and the discrimination they suffer. Defendants for their part are almost always outraged at being sued without notice over what they regard as purely technical violations that have often been present for decades without complaint. More