Pretty much no one thinks that Deborah Laufer, the plaintiff in a civil rights suit that the Supreme Court heard on Wednesday, should be allowed to move forward with her lawsuit. That includes Laufer herself, who has asked the courts to dismiss her case.
Indeed, the only thing that appeared uncertain during Wednesday’s arguments in Acheson Hotels v. Laufer is which of two alternative arguments the Court will embrace when it dismisses this case.
The stakes in Acheson Hotels also seemed to diminish as the argument proceeded. Many civil rights lawyers feared that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court would use this case as a vehicle to drastically roll back the rights of “testers,” individuals who volunteer to be subject to discrimination so that they can bring a federal lawsuit challenging that discrimination. But that outcome now appears unlikely.
At least twice during the oral argument, attorney Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer representing a hotel that was sued by Laufer, insisted that he is not urging the Court to overrule Havens Realty v. Coleman (1982), an important Supreme Court precedent laying out the right of testers to bring civil rights suits. And two conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both agreed that this case is different from Havens.
The bottom line, in other words, is that the Acheson Hotels case is likely to end in a whimper — and possibly with a sigh of relief from the hotel industry.
Two ways to make this case go away
Laufer’s case begins with a federal regulation, known as the “Reservation Rule,” which requires hotel websites to “identify and describe accessible features in the hotels and guest rooms offered through its reservations service in enough detail to reasonably permit individuals with disabilities to assess independently whether a given hotel or guest room meets his or her accessibility needs.”
These hotels aren’t necessarily required to actually offer accessible rooms, but…
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