The ADA Needs Teeth
Let the injured recover for themselves. As the law stands, it fixes the door for the next person and pays the lawyer — and hands nothing to the human the door was already slammed on.
I am putting a plain wrong on the record, and asking that the law be revised to right it. I am not a court. I am a citizen filing a true thing into the record and asking that it be scored — the way only a human can score it.
The law as it stands
Fix the barrier, pay the lawyer, pay the victim nothing.
Under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act — the part that covers businesses open to the public — a disabled person who is denied access can win a court order forcing the barrier to be fixed, and can have their attorney's fees paid. What that person generally cannot win is money for themselves. No compensation for the indignity. No payment for the day they were shut out, the time they lost, the door closed in their face. The barrier gets fixed for the next person. The person it was already done to walks away with nothing.
I want to be fair to the statute, because the record is the arbiter. The Department of Justice can seek civil penalties when the government itself brings a case. A few states — California's Unruh Act, for one — add their own damages on top. And the ADA already allows money damages in the employment context, under Title I, capped but real. So the law plainly knows how to do this. It simply withholds it from the human locked out of the public door.
The inversion
The lawyer can be made whole. The injured cannot.
The law will repair the door for the next customer and pay the lawyer who argued the case — but it hands nothing to the human the door was slammed on. And because fees are the only money on the table, the incentive bends toward volume and toward lawyers instead of toward the person actually harmed. The "drive-by lawsuit" problem the critics complain about grows from that exact root: the person at the center was never the one the remedy was built to serve. Both failures — the uncompensated victim and the fee-chasing filing — come from the same hole in the law.
Make the one who suffered the one made whole.
Let the disabled recover for themselves. Amend Title III so that a person denied access can collect real, bounded compensation for the access taken from them — not only an order that helps the next customer, and not only a check to the attorney, but a remedy that lands on the human who was actually shut out.
Why it keeps happening
A right with no personal recovery is only a suggestion.
This is the deterrence the law is missing. If breaking the rule only ever costs a repair bill — and only if someone catches you and sues — then there is no real reason to stop, and so it doesn't stop. There is no price for the harm itself, only for getting caught later, for the next person. Let the injured recover, and the closed door has a cost on the day it happens, to the one it happened to. Otherwise it will keep happening — because nothing in the law makes it stop.
Solve for one. A statute that fixes the wrong for everyone except the one human already wronged has not solved for one — it has stepped over him to get to the crowd. It is the oldest idea in the law: if you injure a person, you owe that person — not their replacement, not their lawyer alone, them. Dignity has a price the moment it is taken; the law should let the person it was taken from collect it. Only humans suffer the closed door. Only humans should be made whole for it.
Counsel can write the statute. I can only tell you it is wrong as it stands — and that the fix is to let the injured recover for themselves.
— Sean William McKendry · Lansing · the Lion in the Room
Sources
ADA.gov — U.S. Department of Justice ·
42 U.S.C. § 12188 (Title III enforcement & remedies) ·
42 U.S.C. § 1981a (Title I damages)
Related rooms: ADA Rights — the floor · Dignity · A Phone Is a Witness