Justice Calls Disability Act Flawed

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sounded off on the country’s leading law protecting the rights of the disabled Thursday, telling a conference of business lawyers that the high court has been obliged to wrestle with a heavy load of disability rights cases because the 1990 act was drafted too hastily by Congress.

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) is an example of what happens when a bill’s “sponsors are so eager to get something passed that what passes hasn’t been as carefully written as a group of law professors might put together,” O’Connor said at an annual meeting of the Corporate Counsel Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

“That act is one of those that did leave uncertainties as to what Congress had in mind,” she said.

The ADA prohibits discrimination against disabled people at work and in public accommodations, requiring employers and others to make “reasonable accommodations,” such as wheelchair ramps.

On the court, O’Connor has supported its public-accommodations provisions but voted to rein in claims of job discrimination under the act, most recently in Toyota vs. Williams, a case this term in which she wrote an opinion for the court holding that the ADA was not meant to cover an auto worker whose carpal tunnel syndrome made it impossible for her to work on an assembly line but left her able to do chores around the house. The case was decided by a 9-0 vote.

Two more cases related to the ADA have been argued this term and decisions are pending, prompting O’Connor to remark that it could be “remembered as the disabilities act term.”

O’Connor’s remarks were an implicit rebuttal to criticism of her Toyota opinion by one of the ADA’s original sponsors.