- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The defendants are typically small hotels, and Laufer accuses them of failing to comply with a federal regulation requiring that they disclose on their websites whether their rooms are accessible to people with disabilities.
One, Tristan Gillespie, was suspended from the bar of that same Maryland court, in large part because of a scheme where he would use Laufer’s cases to squeeze money out of these hotels for work that he never did.
It involves a perennial plaintiff and lawyers who appear to have profited from a scheme to shake down small business owners — at least one of whom, Gillespie, is the subject of a blistering federal court opinion disciplining him for unethical behavior.
But, in the worst-case scenario for civil rights advocates, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans may not only shut down Laufer’s vast array of lawsuits.
But there is, at least, a real risk that a majority of the justices are so angered by Laufer’s blizzard of lawsuits, and by the behavior of some of her lawyers, that they hand down a far-too-sweeping decision cutting off many meritorious challenges to discrimination.
As Laufer’s current legal team argues in its brief to the Supreme Court, “because Title III[ of the ADA’s] private cause of action is limited to injunctive relief, suing to enforce the Reservation Rule is essentially useless to a disabled traveler who encounters a noncompliant reservation website while looking for a room based on imminent travel plans, as no injunction could be entered in time to help.” Laufer says that, as a tester, she hopes to mitigate this problem by pressuring hotels to fix their websites in advance.
The original article contains 2,705 words, the summary contains 274 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!