News Release

NCD #03-412
April 29, 2003
Contact: Mark S. Quigley
202-272-2004
202-272-2074 TTY
mquigley@ncd.gov

National Council on Disability Addresses Supreme Court's Americans with Disabilities Act Decisions and Substantial Limitation of Major Life Activities

WASHINGTON--The National Council on Disability (NCD) today released a policy brief, The Supreme Court's ADA Decisions Regarding Substantial Limitation of Major Life Activities. It examines the meaning and significance of the concepts of "substantial limitation" and "major life activities," what the Supreme Court has said about them, the implications of the Court's declarations, and how the lower courts have handled questions about substantial limitation on major life activities (http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/limitation.html).

The Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions that affect the interpretation of the requirement in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that, to qualify as a disability under the Act, a condition must substantially limit one or more major life activities. While a few of the Court's statements regarding that requirement may prove beneficial to certain plaintiffs in future cases, the overall effect of the Court's decisions has been to make it more difficult to establish a substantial limitation on a major life activity. At times, the Court has engaged in a wholesale rewriting of the standards for determining what constitutes a substantial limitation on a major life activity, often at odds with the actual language of the ADA and even with the Court's prior rulings.

NCD will address some limitations the Court has imposed on the remedies available in ADA cases and take a cross-issue look at the consequences of the Supreme Court's decisions by contrasting the state of the law before it rendered the decisions with the legal situation after the decisions, to identify undesirable and unjust outcomes in the decisions of the lower courts as a result of the Supreme Court's rulings.

In future papers in this series, NCD will examine various specific substantive aspects of the Court's rulings that have weakened or restricted the impact of the ADA. NCD will then develop legislative proposals for addressing those issues that appear appropriate for legislative correction, and present those proposals, along with pertinent supportive material from the previous papers in this series in a final, comprehensive report entitled Righting the ADA.