I’ve written previously about the Tennessee v. Lane case that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. Today, the Court ruled that states can be sued under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This decision came as something of a surprise to many because, in recent years, the Court has adopted a doctrine of limited federal powers based on the Eleventh Amendment. In fact, the Court had already ruled in another case, Garrett, that states cannot be sued under Title I of the ADA (covering employment discrimination). Title II requires publicly funded services and programs to be accessible to people with disabilities and the Court found that the legislation was congruent and proportional to its stated aim of making courts accessible. But that’s what’s puzzling about this ruling; it’s limited to the specific fact pattern of the case. The Court refuses to state whether states would be covered by Title II in cases involving other services or programs. I’m not sure why the majority took this approach. It seems counter-productive to leave the door open to future litigation with the somewhat absurd result of courts having to parse out the scope of a state’s responsibilities under Title II. Perhaps the Justices didn’t want to give the impression that they were making a dramatic break with previous Eleventh Amendment holdings.
And I have to point out something Scalia said in his concurring dissent:
Requiring access for disabled persons to all public buildings cannot remotely be considered a means of �enforcing� the Fourteenth Amendment. The considerations of long accepted practice and of policy that sanctioned such distortion of language where state racial discrimination is at issue do not apply in this field of social policy far removed from the principal object of the Civil War Amendments.
It’s this kind of strict textualism that drives me up the wall. How is eliminating institutional discrimination any different than eliminating institutional racial discrimination? No, the drafters of the 14th Amendment probably had no concept of disability rights, but they did have the wisdom to not restrict the Amendment purely to matters of race. The Fourteenth Amendment sprang out of the horrors of slavery, but it was crafted to ensure equal protection to everyone with no exceptions or qualifiers. Scalia rigid interpretation is without intellectual merit and, frankly, it’s un-American
excellent!
The 19th Floor I’ve written previously about the Tennessee v. Lane case that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. Today, the Court ruled that states can be sued under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act….