A hot area of the Americans with Disabilities Act jurisprudence is the question of mixed motive. That is, can a plaintiff get a mixed motive jury instruction in Americans with Disabilities Act cases, or for that matter in Rehabilitation Act cases as well, in light of Gross v. FBL Financial Services? Previously, we have
Title I
Sovereign immunity principles outside of sovereign immunity claims and the importance of self-evaluation and transition plans
In a previous blog entry, I talked about the principle of sovereign immunity as it applies to persons with disabilities. As mentioned in that blog entry, a state, including an arm of the state, is not going to be forced to waive its sovereign immunity with respect to disability discrimination in employment matters.…
LSAT and Title III discrimination
Anybody that wants to go to law school must take the LSAT, law school admission test sponsored by the law school admission Council (LSAC) . The LSAT is a standardized test consisting of 100 multiple-choice questions ( Binno v. American Bar Association, 2012 WL 4513617, *1 (E.D. Mich. September 30, 2012)), divided into five…
Persons with disabilities and peremptory challenges
Few cases today actually go to trial. However, the ones that do go to trial involving juries necessarily mean that a jury has to be picked first. Jurors aren’t so much picked as they are eliminated. With respect to jury selection, there are three kinds of jury challenges. First, there is a peremptory challenge. Peremptory…
Sovereign immunity and persons with disabilities
Sovereign immunity is enormously complicated. What it is, is a principle from which the founding fathers took from England that says a sovereign cannot be sued for damages without its consent. This principal goes way back, and also can be found in the 11th amendment to the United States Constitution. The language of the 11th…
Is reassignment mandatory revisited
In a prior blog entry, I discussed a case where the Seventh Circuit was faced with the question as to whether the ADA mandated reassignment or whether competitive bidding would suffice in order to comply with the ADA. That particular case, as discussed previously in this blog, held that prior Seventh Circuit precedent…
How might you know when more leave is a reasonable accommodation once FMLA leave has been used up?
There are several laws out there that intersect with the Americans with Disabilities Act. One of them is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). That law intersects with the Americans with Disabilities Act in a variety of ways. I am not going to explore all of those ways in this entry. What I do…
Reassignment revisited
In a prior blog entry, I discussed how the issue of reassignment when an otherwise qualified person with a disability can no longer do the job would eventually be headed to the Supreme Court. However, that entry did not address the question as to how you go about proving up, i.e. making a prima…
Defending essential functions
I recently relocated my office. Therefore, that is why you haven’t seen an entry in a little bit. I am now settled in and will get back to regular blogging. Thank you for bearing with me.
With the amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act, litigation will now shift from whether a person has a…
Olmstead evolves
In Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999), United States Supreme Court held that it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act for for a State to have a system that did not allow persons with mental illness to be treated in the community. Since that time, the United States government has been very aggressive…