The New Ada-expanding Coverage and Redefining Disability
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Citation | Vol. 39 No. 1 Pg. 47 |
| Pages | 47 |
| Publication year | 2010 |
2010, January, Pg. 47. The New ADA-Expanding Coverage and Redefining Disability
January 2010
Vol. 39, No. 1 [Page 47]
Labor and Employment Law articles are sponsored by the CBA Labor and Employment Law Section to present current issues and topics of interest to attorneys, judges, and legal and judicial administrators on all aspects of labor and employment law in Colorado.
Coordinating Editor
John M. Husband, Denver, of Holland and Hart LLP-(303) 295-8228, jhusband@hollandhart.com
About the Author
Shelley S. Bailey is an Assistant County Attorney for Boulder County, where she practices employment law, elections law, public health law, and open records law. She is currently co-chair of the Boulder County Bar Association Employment Law Committee-(303) 441-3435, sbailey@bouldercounty.org.
Over the last decade, Supreme Court decisions have limited the number of people covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This article discusses the 2008 amendments to the ADA, which have expanded coverage and overturned several of the Court's decisions.
On September 25, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), which became effective January 1, 2009.(fn1) The ADAAA makes the protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)(fn2) available to many more people by expanding interpretation of the definition of "disability." It also overturns several Supreme Court decisions limiting coverage of the ADA. Federal court decisions have held that people with conditions such as epilepsy, diabetes, bipolar disorder, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and muscular dystrophy were not disabled under the ADA.(fn3) As a result, in 2004, plaintiffs lost 97 percent of the ADA employment discrimination claims that went to trial, often due to the limited interpretation of the term "disability."(fn4) The 2008 changes will likely lead to a significant increase in successful cases that hinge on whether an individual is disabled within the guidelines of the ADA.
This article explains the cases that the legislature overturned in the new amendments. The article also looks at how interpreting the definition of "disability" has widely expanded the coverage of the ADA, along with Congress's reasoning behind the changes. Finally, this article discusses some additional, though no less important, changes to the ADA and how it will be implemented in the future.
Broadening Coverage
The ADAAA made sweeping changes to several areas of the law. First, it deleted two Congressional "findings" in the ADA that previously led the Supreme Court to restrict the meaning and application of the term "disability."(fn5) The findings were that:
1) approximately 43 million Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities, and this number as a whole is increasing as the population as a whole is growing older;(fn6) and
2) individuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority.(fn7)
The federal courts and the Supreme Court did not, as they had with other civil rights statutes, use these findings to broadly construe the ADA. Rather, the courts used them to limit how they construed other provisions of the ADA-for instance, narrowing them to exclude many people from the definition of "disability."(fn8) The ADAAA replaced the findings with the following determination:
[P]hysical or mental disabilities in no way diminish a person's right to fully participate in all aspects of society, yet many people with physical or mental disabilities have been precluded from doing so because of discrimination; others who have a record of a disability or are regarded as having a disability also have been subjected to discrimination.(fn9)The Supreme Court's decisions in Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc.(fn10) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams(fn11) were based on the above findings that were removed from the ADA. The ADAAA states that it rejects the holdings in both cases, as well as in companion cases.(fn12) It also states...
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