Important Title II Victory in Supreme Court
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Above: Advocates crawling across the Supreme Court plaza made a strong visual statement about the importance to the disability community of this case calling for equal and accessible entrance to the courts and other public buildings for all Americans. (Photo by Brewster Thackeray, N.O.D.)
States that fail to make their courthouses accessible to people with disabilities can be sued for damages under the ADA, the Supreme Court ruled in a significant break from recent decisions giving states broad immunity from suit under various federal laws. The case is Tennessee v. Lane, No. 02-1667.
The 5-to-4 decision was narrow in scope. Rather than validate, or even address, Congress's decision in the ADA to open the states to suit for failing to make accessible a broad array of public services and programs, Justice Stevens confined his majority opinion to the specific context presented by the case: access to court systems. Other contexts covered by Title II, which prohibits governments from discriminating on the basis of disability in access to their "services, programs or activities," must await future rulings. Claims involving access to places where fundamental rights are not usually exercised - publicly owned hockey rinks were one example mentioned - may not fare as well.
The decision affirmed a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati. Last year that court rejected Tennessee's claim of immunity from a suit brought in 1998 by George Lane, a man who refused to crawl or be carried up to a second-floor courtroom in a county courthouse to answer a criminal traffic complaint, and Beverly Jones, a court stenographer whose reliance on a wheelchair kept her from many Tennessee courtrooms.
Justice Ginsburg said that "legislation calling upon all government actors to respect the dignity of individuals with disabilities is entirely compatible with our Constitution's commitment to federalism, properly conceived." Justice Souter wrote that judges had been part of the history of official mistreatment of people with disabilities, for years enforcing or upholding laws or policies that were flagrantly discriminatory. That history was relevant because the factual dispute within the court centered on whether Congress had sufficient justification for opening the states to suit under the ADA.
As interpreted in recent decisions, the 11th Amendment to the Constitution ordinarily bars private lawsuits against states in federal court unless Congress has acted within its own authority to abrogate that immunity. Further, the court has ruled, Congress can validly take that step only in the exercise of its power to enforce the equal-protection and due-process guarantees of the 14th Amendment, and only then as a "congruent and proportional" response to official failure to enforce those guarantees.
In a 2001 ruling, the court held that Congress had lacked a basis for permitting states to be sued under Title I of the ADA, which applies to state employment. There was an insufficient record of state discrimination against disabled public employees, Chief Justice Rehnquist said for the majority then, while suggesting that the record for Title II might be different. It is different, insisted Justice Stevens. In its years of consideration before passing the ADA, "Congress learned that many individuals, in many states across the country, were being excluded from courthouses and court proceedings by reason of their disabilities," he said.
A copy of the decision can be obtained at: Tennessee v. Lane (Legal Information Institute's Supreme Court Collection) 
(http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-1667.ZS.html
(Source: "States Can Be Liable for Not Making Courthouses Accessible," by Linda Greenhouse, New York Times, May 18, 2004.)
