A line in the sand: in two important the rulings, the Supreme Court makes it clear that there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to the ADA - Employment Law - Americans with Disabilities Act

HR Magazine, July, 2002 by Michael Barrier

Last March, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor complained that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is frustratingly vague. The act leaves "uncertainties as to what Congress had in mind," she told a gathering of corporation lawyers. O'Connor offered her comments soon after the Supreme Court ruled in one major ADA case (Toyota v. Williams, 00-1089) and a few weeks before it ruled in another (Barnett v. US Airways, 00-1250). Unfortunately, those rulings will leave employers feeling just as uncertain about the law as O'Connor.

The central questions raised by the ADA--and addressed rather vaguely by the Toyota and Barnett decisions--are these:

* When does a mental or physical impairment become a disability within the meaning of the law?

* How far must employers go to accommodate employees with such disabilities?

These questions have plagued employers since the law's inception--and have yet to be fully clarified.

"We thought when this law came out [in 1990] that there were a lot of ambiguities, that things would be done on a case-by-case basis," says Peter J. Petesch, an attorney with Ford & Harrison LLP in Washington, D.C. "After 12 years of case law, we've certainly gained a greater understanding as to who's protected, and we've gained some understanding of how far the accommodation obligation goes. But we've got a long way to go."

This year's Supreme Court decisions were made against that shimmering backdrop of uncertainty, and the result has been just as indefinite: Lawyers are not of one mind as to whether the uncertainty has been reduced or, if so, by how much and in what way. Employers will look in vain to the Supreme Court's decisions for a bright-line test that separates what is required from what is forbidden.

Instead, the court's decisions seem to reinforce the message that each situation must be analyzed separately on a case-by-case basis.

Toyota v. Williams: What Is a Disability?

In the Toyota case, which was decided last January, Ella Williams sued the Toyota Motor Manufacturing's George town, Ky., plant for failing to accommodate her carpal tunnel syndrome. The court unanimously ruled in Toyota's favor. Although Williams could not perform some of the manual tasks required by her job, she was not "substantially limited" in a "major life activity"--a requirement of the ADA--and therefore was not disabled under the law, the court ruled.

Camille Olson, an attorney with Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago and a member of the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) Employee and Labor Relations Committee, sees good news for employers in that decision.

"I think there's no question that the Toyota case limited the ADA by narrowly construing who is disabled," says Olson. Just because an employee has an impairment that limits how he can perform a particular task, "that doesn't, on its own, mean that the employer is going to be required to restructure the job."

Olson believes the Toyota decision will make it harder for plaintiffs to show their conditions are covered by the ADA. The ruling could thus allay employers' fears of being sued for not making job-specific accommodations.

However, she also points out the need for case-specific analysis. "To decide whether someone is disabled," she says, "you need to look not just to their particular job but also to the individual's ability to perform everyday tasks."

Petesch warns against interpreting the decision to mean that employees with impairments have lost their protection under the ADA. "It just means you have to look a little more deeply," he says.

"There's a lot we still don't know in the wake of the Toyota case," he adds. "The court didn't even commit itself to whether working was a major life activity."

Such unanswered questions, says Michael J. Lotito, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in San Francisco and 2000 chair of SHRM's board of directors, mean the Toyota ruling "presents the possibility for even more litigation. In some ways the litigation is going to be more expensive, because it's going to be more searching. You're going to have to establish how a particular condition impacts the individual not only with respect to working but how it impacts their ability to live."

Chai Feldblum, a disability activist and law professor at Georgetown University, agrees that the decision may encourage more suits--and more cost for employers. "The court's decision means that employers are going to have to continue to pay a lot of money to their management lawyers in defending ADA suits. Under this case, instead of employers knowing that essentially everyone is covered," as under other civil rights laws, they must determine case-by-case whether an impairment qualifies as a disability.

Employers like Toyota "don't spend thousands of dollars paying management lawyers to argue whether someone is really black or not," Feldblum says, "but they spend tons of their business dollars paying management lawyers to argue about whether someone is substantially limited enough in a life activity. A suit that would take 15 hours of lawyer time if it was a woman or an African American suing [can take] 1,500 hours of lawyer time if it's someone with carpal tunnel that's suing. The Toyota case did not reduce that 1,500 hours of lawyer time."