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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Civil suits can be very Zif's Law-prone, where a small number of actors can put an outsized number of lawsuits forward, unless the statute is very limited (and the various enforcement arms actually stick to that rather than redefining it). Laufer from Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, for example, filed "557 suits in sixteen different states, plus the District of Columbia", and while she's at the higher end of ADA testers, individual people with thousands of tester lawsuits exist.

But that depends on a number of very specific attributes: ADA tester targets have a lot of capital, they're often represented by insurance companies that are willing to give cash, the (court and administrative interpretation of) relevant statutory language in many circuits allows both standing and damages to be found without normal concrete harm, a very compliant regulatory system that writes increasingly broad material to base a lawsuit on, so on. Hence why SB8 lawsuits are very thin on the ground, and with HB1557 only allowing declaratory and injunctive relief it'll be the domain of morons tilting at windmills. The gun private right of action laws tend to be much more mixed -- lots of cash out there both to support lawsuits going in and reward them coming out, but standard of harm is a mess, and the PLCAA is only dying rather than dead.

In theory, it should be possible to write statutory language that limits testing trolls while still allowing even small lawsuits over actual harm, but a) a there's a pretty sizable portion of the support for the ADA that thinks the lawsuit heavy enforcement is a benefit, and b) it's not clear that actually would work, anyway.