Supreme Court Dismisses Disability Activist’s Case as Moot

The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed as moot a dispute over whether a disabled woman could sue a hotel for violating a federal disability law even though she did not plan to stay there.

The woman, Deborah Laufer, had sued hundreds of hotels whose websites did not say whether they had rooms accessible to disabled people, as required by a regulation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She typically asked the hotels to admit they broke the law, fix the issue and pay her legal fees.

“As the sheer number of lawsuits suggests,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for seven justices, “she does not focus her efforts on hotels where she has any thought of staying, much less booking a room. Instead, Laufer systematically searches the web to find hotels that fail to provide accessibility information and sues to force compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The case before the court, Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, No. 22-429, started in September 2020, when Ms. Laufer sued Acheson Hotels, the operator of the Coast Village Inn and Cottages, a small hotel in Wells, Maine. The question the justices agreed to answer was whether “testers” like Ms. Laufer had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injuries that gave them standing to sue.

In a surprise twist after the court agreed to hear the case, Ms. Laufer dismissed her suit against the hotel and others, promised not to file more suits like it and asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the case before it as moot. She said accusations of misconduct against one of her lawyers warranted the unusual action, adding that the hotel is now under new ownership and that its website has been updated to reflect disability accommodations.

The lawyer, Tristan Gillespie, was said to have demanded $10,000 in legal fees in each case even though he used “boilerplate complaints,” Justice Barrett wrote, citing court papers. “In addition,” she wrote, “Gillespie funneled six-figure sums to the father of Laufer’s grandchild for investigatory work that he never performed, raising the prospect that either Gillespie or Laufer (or both) got a cut of the money.”

Justice Barrett wrote that the court was free to decide whether Ms. Laufer had standing but that dismissing the case as moot was the prudent course. “We emphasize, however,” she added, “that we might exercise our discretion differently in a future case.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he would have addressed the question the court had agreed to review and ruled that Ms. Laufer had no standing to sue. “I would not reward Laufer’s transparent tactic for evading our review,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court has allowed testers to sue under the Fair Housing Act, Justice Thomas acknowledged, citing Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, a 1982 decision in which a white and a Black tester answered an advertisement about rental apartments. The Black woman was told there were no vacancies, while the white man was told apartments were available.

Ms. Laufer’s case was different, Justice Thomas wrote. “The Black tester had been personally denied that truthful information, so she had standing to bring her claim,” he wrote. “Havens Realty thus has no bearing on Laufer’s standing as a tester of compliance with the A.D.A., which provides no such statutory right to information.”

In a second concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed the case was moot but said she would not have vacated an appeals court’s ruling in Ms. Laufer’s favor.