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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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In addition to the possibility of "Anonymous" or "No Name Given", or ToaKraka's random nutjob, a plausible explanation is that this is someone who's financially charged with producing these complaints. In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits. The spread isn't quite as wide... but then again, the return is less direct, too. But you don't have to get money directly from a court case to make a career out of it.

I don't know that this is true. But I can look at the complaints from here and find a name that could hit the 20-complaints-a-day scenario without having to spend all day working on complaints, because he or she has people for that.

This isn't inherently wrong: the most abusive ADA testers tend to bubble up to the top simply because it's easier to find bullshit, but the fundamental of having actual harmed people asking for fixes rather than an army of ill-planned regulators isn't a bad one, even recognizing that most 'actual harmed people' won't have the energy or time to go through the full procedure. (Though I've got my complaints about the extent of both the ADA and modern Title IX/Title VI law).

And it may not be the case here.

This isn't inherently wrong: the most abusive ADA testers tend to bubble up to the top simply because it's easier to find bullshit, but the fundamental of having actual harmed people asking for fixes rather than an army of ill-planned regulators isn't a bad one, even recognizing that most 'actual harmed people' won't have the energy or time to go through the full procedure.

Disagree. Having a government employ people for the express people of stress-testing private actors for whether they're engaged in discrimination when there are no actual discriminated-against people involved in the test is Kafkaesque and provides perverse incentives for the testers.

My first thought after "Anonymous" was a lawyer (perhaps aided by a few paralegals and interns) for whom filing these complaints is just a job. I hadn't made the connection to ADA testers but now that you mention them the idea checks out.

The lawyer thing wouldn't make sense anyway considering the volume of complaints and the suggestion in the article that so few of them had any merit. Fee awards in these kinds of cases (assuming OCR even has the authority to award them) are directly tied to the amount billed in the case, and possibly knocked down if the court finds they aren't reasonable. If a firm screens its cases carefully then it can get away with losing a few and effectively working for free on them since they're by definition making a profit on every hour billed, but filing thousands of complaints in a year suggests that the effort it takes to file them is minimal, and if the effort is minimal, so are the fees. If a firm can reasonably expect to collect 5k in fees for each successful case and it files 5,000 cases in a year then they need to win a lot of cases to justify laying out 25 million in billables up front. Most of the practice areas that make hay on statutory entitlement to fee awards are in areas where it's usually pretty clear that they're going to win. For example, I used to occasionally do Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collections Act stuff, and if a client comes to you with evidence of a violation, you can usually get a quick settlement because they know they'll lose in court and can at least save their own attorney's fees. If I have cell phone records showing that a debt collector called a client outside of the mandated hours, or at a frequency that's well within the unreasonable range, or something similar, then I could usually get a thousand bucks for the client and three grand in fees for a couple days worth of work. But that's because the debt collector doesn't have a defense and usually knows it. If these were tossups my usual rate is halved and if they're real crapshoots then I'm getting peanuts and it's unsustainable. This is obviously different from big personal injury cases where hundreds of thousands of dollars are involved and you only have to hit every once in a while to make your contingency fee worth it.

In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits.

There is a SCOTUS case coming on this. Last month the Supreme Court elected to take up an appeal from a 1st Circuit case questioning whether a self-appointed ADA "tester" has standing to sue for damages in federal court if they never intend to actually visit the place they're "testing":

The plaintiff, Deborah Laufer, has brought 600 lawsuits against hotels around the United States. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hotels are required to make information about their accessibility to people with disabilities available on reservation portals. In this case, Laufer – who has physical disabilities and vision impairments – went to federal court in Maine, where she alleged that a website for an inn that Acheson Hotels operates in that state did not contain enough information about the inn’s accommodations for people with disabilities.

The district court threw out her lawsuit. It agreed with Acheson Hotels that Laufer did not have standing because she had no plans to visit the hotel and therefore was not injured by the lack of information on the website. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit reinstated Laufer’s lawsuit.

That prompted Acheson Hotels to come to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in. The company pointed to a division among the courts of appeals on whether cases like Laufer’s can move forward; indeed, Acheson Hotels noted, courts have reached different conclusions about whether Laufer can bring these kinds of cases. And the issue has “immense practical importance,” the company stressed, describing a “cottage industry” “in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit, while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments.”

Laufer agreed that review was warranted, although she urged the justices to uphold the lower court’s ruling. The justices will likely hear argument in the case in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in 2024.

The plaintiff, Deborah Laufer, has brought 600 lawsuits against hotels around the United States. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hotels are required to make information about their accessibility to people with disabilities available on reservation portals.

What an absolutely loathsome person. Anyone with a shred of common decency would just call and ask whatever question they had about the hotel if it was a genuine question, but nope, the goal here is entirely to antagonize anyone that doesn't comply with Byzantine rules on their websites. Laufer acts more like a misaligned AI than a person that honestly wants to make the world a better place.

Even the blind and wheelchair bound need to make a living. Even if it’s parasitic and something a sane society wouldn’t consider a job.

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