Why two conservative justices want courts to reconsider disability discrimination suits
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Supreme Court sides with straight woman in 'reverse discrimination' case
The Supreme Court made a unanimous decision after siding with a woman who claims she didn't get a job and then was demoted because she is straight.
Scripps News
WASHINGTON – Disability rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court on June 12 made it easier for students with disabilities to sue schools for damages.
Not only did all the justices agree that some courts were using too tough a standard to block lawsuits like one brought by a Minnesota teenager with a rare form of epilepsy, but they also rejected her school's argument that the real issue is the standard is too lax for other types of disability discrimination claims.
'The very foundation of disability civil rights was on the line,' Shira Wakschlag, an attorney with The Arc of the United States, said in a statement after the decision.
But the court didn't settle the larger issue of what the standard should be in all cases. The justices only said there shouldn't be different standards for discrimination claims involving educational instruction.
And two of the court's six conservatives – Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh – said the school raised 'serious arguments' that courts are getting that standard wrong.
In a concurring opinion, Thomas wrote that he hopes 'lower courts will carefully consider whether the existing standards comport with the Constitution and the underlying statutory text.'
Two of the court's three liberals – Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – pushed back, saying the school's argument that a person with a disability must prove there was an intent to discriminate is clearly wrong.
'The statutes' text and history, as well as this Court's precedent, foreclose any such purpose requirement,' Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion.
More: In unanimous decision, Supreme Court makes it easier for students with disabilities to sue schools
How the case got to the Supreme Court
The issue in the Minnesota case was whether the school failed to accommodate the special needs of Ava Tharpe, whose rare form of epilepsy makes it difficult to attend school in the morning.
Federal courts agreed with the family that the school hadn't done enough and needed to provide evening instruction.
But the courts said the Tharpes couldn't use the Americans with Disabilities Act to try to get the school to pay for outside teachers and other expenses incurred before they won their case. And they said the Tharpes couldn't use the Rehabilitation Act to seek a court order binding the school to teach Ava after regular school hours.
Judges on the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said their hands were tied because of a 1982 circuit decision – Monahan v. Nebraska − that said school officials need to have acted with 'bad faith or gross misjudgment' for suits to go forward involving educational services for children with disabilities.
That's a tougher standard than the 'deliberate indifference' rule often used when weighing other types of disability discrimination claims.
The school argued that 'deliberate indifference' is too lax. Their lawyers said the plain text of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act prohibit only intentional discrimination.
What the Supreme Court decided
The Supreme Court said they couldn't consider that argument because they'd only been asked to decide whether the lower courts were correct to apply a 'uniquely stringent' standard for cases like Ava's – not to decide what the standard should be in all cases.
'We will not entertain the (school) District's invitation to inject into this case significant issues that have not been fully presented,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
Thomas said he agreed that it wouldn't have been right for the court to take on the larger issue with its significant ramifications for disability rights.
But in his concurring opinion that Kavanaugh joined, Thomas said he'd be willing to do so in an 'appropriate case.'
'Whether federal courts are applying the correct legal standard under two widely utilized federal statutes is an issue of national importance,' he wrote, 'and the (school) District has raised serious arguments that the prevailing standards are incorrect.'
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