Case law dealing with the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act will often say say that the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act are governed by the same standards. Eg. Greer v. Richardson Independent School District, 2012 WL 833367, *12 fn 1 (fifth Cir. March 14, 2012). That said, are
Americans with Disabilities Act
Is a Mixed Motive Jury Instruction Dead under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Rehabilitation Act?
At the top of the legal resources section on this page, you will see a link to an article that I wrote regarding whether a mixed motive jury instruction is available under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A mixed motive jury instruction is an instruction that says that liability can exist if the plaintiff can…
Title II can’t be used to keep places that grow pot for medical purposes open
There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere, particularly among media, about the decision that just came down from the Ninth Circuit involving the efforts of the cities of Costa Mesa and Lake Forest in California to close down places that grew pot for medical purposes. The link to that decision is below…
Class is in session: Does the Defendant Have a Right to Know Who Is Enrolled
Before anyone can file a suit alleging a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, they first have to exhaust administrative remedies. That means they have to file a claim with the EEOC first. In some cases, a plaintiff files a claim with the state discrimination authority and that claim gets cross filed with the…
Help wanted: ASL practitioners
A fascinating case, Belton v. Georgia, 2012 WL 1080304 (N.D. Ga. March 30, 2012), recently came down from the northern district of Georgia. In this case, two people who were both deaf and suffered from mental illness sued the state of Georgia because the state of Georgia simply was not set up to accommodate…
The ADA, The rehabilitation act, and the ministerial exception
This blog entry asks the question as to what is the status of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act with respect to employees that work for religious institutions. Recently, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 132 S. Ct. 694 (2012). In that case,…
NFL CBA and the ADA
Persons with disabilities and the National Football League have been in the news of late. In particular, the Chicago Bears acquired a person with a mental disability and then there was the person in the draft that scored very poorly on the Wunderlic test. I thought it would be interesting to go through the collective…
Comply with the ADA, commit a felony, be sued for actual and punitive damages… Really?
It is crystal clear that under the ADA that a student in the classroom as a reasonable accommodation would have the right to tape record or otherwise record the class. See 28 C.F.R. § 35.104(2),(3). However, you may want to look at your state’s eavesdropping statute to see if there aren’t some unintended consequences of…
Did the Second Circuit really do that? Is the ADA retroactive
Since the changes are so radical between the Americans with Disabilities Act and the ADAAA in many ways, a question comes up as to whether those changes are retroactive to pending ADA cases where the facts occurred entirely before January of 2009. There are two U.S. Supreme Court cases out there that strongly suggest that…
Reassignment of employees… Eventually headed to the US Supreme Court
Yesterday, in EEOC v. United Airlines, Incorporated, (docket number 11-1774, March 7, 2012 (Seventh Circuit)), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit came down with a decision saying that United Air Lines was under no obligation to guarantee a reassignment to a vacant position for an employee that could no longer…