Sotomayor and disability law
Thursday, May 28 2009
Keri at Diabetes Mine asks:
Does the position of Supreme Court Justice fall under the American Disabilities Act? Good question.
Kerri is responding to some speculation elsewhere on the interwebs, about Sotomayor’s health – she has diabetes – being a liability in her nomination and confirmation, but let’s be honest: this is a dumb and contrived controversy.
Granted, it would be nice to have someone who identifies as chronically ill on the Court – but it would suffice to have someone who can interpret the law fairly towards sick people. You may recall that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act was so egregiously bad – excluding large numbers of sick people from its protection – that last year Congress passed a revised version of the Act which expanded those protections. One hopes the new ADA language is idiot-proof, but the test of that is the courts – especially the Supreme Court.
So how does Sotomayor do on ADA law? Glenn Greenwald, who was one of the lawyers in the case, points to Norville vs. SIUH as an indication. Norville was a nurse, injured on the job, who tried to return to work. The ADA requires that when a disabled person is not able to perform a job, the employer offer an equivalent job if it is available. Norville’s employer had such an opening, but Norville was only offered a far inferior position. There central issue was jury instructions – whether the judge erred in not telling the jury that an inferior job does not meet the ADA standard of reasonable accomodation when an equivalent job is available.
Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the three-judge panel, which decided in Norville’s favor on the ADA claim (while rejecting the age and race discrimination claims) – sending Norville’s case back to the jury, where she subsequently won a substantial verdict for disability discrimination. This was a good decision, but not one particularly portentious for the sick and disabled.
However, according to SCOTUSblog:
Sotomayor has been perhaps most sympathetic to claims of discrimination arising from a disability. [...] And she has twice dissented from the majority’s decision to deny a discrimination claim.
SCOTUSBlog notes her decision in Norville, but also mentions the two dissents. In particular, she dissented in EEOC vs. J.B. Hunt on a pivotal issue in ADA interpretation: “major life activities”. One of the injuries the courts have done to the ADA is a consistent narrowing of the understanding of “major life activities” – according to the ADA, you’re not disabled unless your injury or illness affects a major life activity. One of those major life activities is working – if you can’t work, you’re disabled.
In EEOC v. Hunt, the issue was whether denying people jobs as long-distance truckers if they took certain prescription medications was discrimination under the ADA. The majority ruled that it wasn’t – reasoning that working as a long-distance trucker does not count as a major life activity. Similar reasoning appeared in the Supreme Court’s decision in Williams v. Toyota – a major case in ADA law, and a major blow to people with chronic illness – which was decided unanimously at about the same time.
In Sotomayor’s dissent on EEOC v. Hunt (at the bottom of the majority opinion), she argued that given the training, experience, and credentials of the people being discriminated against, the company’s decision to discriminate against them meant they were indeed limited in their ability to work – and thus disabled; that is, if the only job you know how to do is long-distance trucking, and you can’t do it for health reasons, you are limited in your ability to work. I don’t know enough about this sort of law, but I am going to speculate that this is a fairly active and creative argument towards broader interpretation of the ADA. And lest you worry that she is being too empathetic towards the disabled, bear in mind that her opinion was totally validated by Congress’s passage of the ADA Restoration Act.
All of which suggests to me that when ADA and similar issues come before the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor is more than capable of interpreting the laws of this country in ways that are just, fair, and equitable towards sick people – an ability mysteriously absent from the present court. Maybe this is because she has diabetes, maybe it’s because her mom was a nurse, or maybe it’s because she possesses a fine legal mind. Whatever the case, sick people could do a lot worse than Sonia Sotomayor on the bench.
