{"id":189675,"date":"2025-06-16T18:50:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T18:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/189675\/"},"modified":"2025-06-16T18:50:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T18:50:08","slug":"disability-groups-won-big-at-the-supreme-court-the-fight-isnt-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/189675\/","title":{"rendered":"Disability groups won big at the Supreme Court. The fight isn’t over."},"content":{"rendered":"

The high court unanimously said courts can’t use a higher standard to block suits for damages for some disability discrimination claims and not others. But they declined to set the standard.<\/p>\n

\"play\"<\/p>\n

Supreme Court sides with straight woman in ‘reverse discrimination’ case<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court made a unanimous decision after siding with a woman who claims she didn\u2019t get a job and then was demoted because she is straight.<\/p>\n

Scripps News<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2013 Disability rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief now that the Supreme Court<\/a> has made it easier<\/a> for students with disabilities to sue schools for damages.<\/p>\n

Not only did all the justices agree June 12 that some courts were using too tough a standard to block lawsuits like one brought by a Minnesota teenager with a rare form of epilepsy, but they also rejected her school\u2019s argument<\/a> that the real issue is the standard is too lax for other types of disability discrimination claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very foundation of disability civil rights was on the line,\u201d Shira Wakschlag, an attorney with The Arc of the United States, said in a statement after the decision.<\/p>\n

But the court didn\u2019t settle the larger question of what the standard should be in all cases. The justices said only that there shouldn\u2019t be different standards for discrimination claims involving educational instruction.<\/p>\n

And two of the court\u2019s six conservatives \u2013 Justices Clarence Thomas<\/a> and Brett Kavanaugh<\/a> \u2013 said the school raised \u201cserious arguments\u201d that courts are getting that standard wrong.<\/p>\n

In a concurring opinion<\/a>, Thomas wrote that he hopes \u201clower courts will carefully consider whether the existing standards comport with the Constitution and the underlying statutory text.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of the court\u2019s three liberals \u2013 Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson \u2013 pushed back, saying the school\u2019s argument that a person with a disability must prove there was an intent to discriminate is clearly wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe statutes\u2019 text and history, as well as this Court\u2019s precedent, foreclose any such purpose requirement,\u201d Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion.<\/p>\n

More: <\/strong>In unanimous decision, Supreme Court makes it easier for students with disabilities to sue schools<\/a><\/p>\n

The question in the Minnesota case was whether the school failed to accommodate the special needs of Ava Tharpe, whose rare form of epilepsy makes it difficult to attend school in the morning.<\/p>\n

Federal courts agreed with the family that the school hadn\u2019t done enough and needed to provide evening instruction.<\/p>\n

But the courts said the Tharpes couldn\u2019t use the Americans with Disabilities Act to try to get the school to pay for outside teachers and other expenses incurred before they won their case. And they said the Tharpes couldn\u2019t use the Rehabilitation Act to seek a court order binding the school to teach Ava after regular school hours.<\/p>\n

Judges on the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said their hands were tied because of a 1982 circuit decision\u00a0\u2013 Monahan v. Nebraska \u2212 that said school officials need to have acted with \u201cbad faith or gross misjudgment\u201d for suits to go forward involving educational services for children with disabilities.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a tougher standard than the \u201cdeliberate indifference\u201d rule often used when weighing other types of disability discrimination claims.<\/p>\n

The school argued that \u201cdeliberate indifference\u201d is too lax. Their lawyers said the plain text of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act prohibit only intentional discrimination.<\/p>\n

What the Supreme Court decided<\/p>\n

The justices said they couldn\u2019t consider that argument because they had been asked only to decide whether the lower courts were correct to apply a \u201cuniquely stringent\u201d standard for cases like Ava\u2019s \u2013 not to decide what the standard should be in all cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will not entertain the (school) District\u2019s invitation to inject into this case significant issues that have not been fully presented,\u201d Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Thomas said he agreed it wouldn\u2019t have been right for the court to take on the larger issue with its significant ramifications for disability rights.<\/p>\n

But in his concurring opinion joined by Kavanaugh, Thomas said he\u2019d be willing to do so in an \u201cappropriate case.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether federal courts are applying the correct legal standard under two widely utilized federal statutes is an issue of national importance,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand the (school) District has raised serious arguments that the prevailing standards are incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The high court unanimously said courts can’t use a higher standard to block suits for damages for some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[5176,48760,26714,14334,52194,77746,8182,30,7798,20056,8522,8530,2266,61325,105,56804,5905,1302,7261,1106,55765,77745,67847,2725,7900,61324,6584,23426,23428,3577,5179,6591,457,8528,55768,55775,8523,48,55770,55769,4678,8183,8181,8189,5598,5181,2739,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-189675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-and","9":"tag-brown","10":"tag-civil","11":"tag-conditions","12":"tag-constitutional","13":"tag-constitutional-law-u0026-civil-rights","14":"tag-court","15":"tag-courts","16":"tag-courts-u0026-judiciary","17":"tag-disabilities","18":"tag-discrimination","19":"tag-discrimination-u0026-identity-relations","20":"tag-education","21":"tag-education-methodology-and-innovation","22":"tag-health","23":"tag-health-conditions","24":"tag-identity","25":"tag-innovation","26":"tag-jackson","27":"tag-judiciary","28":"tag-k-12","29":"tag-ketanji","30":"tag-ketanji-brown-jackson","31":"tag-law","32":"tag-legal","33":"tag-methodology","34":"tag-negative","35":"tag-neurological","36":"tag-neurological-conditions","37":"tag-of","38":"tag-overall","39":"tag-overall-negative","40":"tag-people","41":"tag-people-u0026-society","42":"tag-primary","43":"tag-primary-u0026-secondary-schooling-k-12","44":"tag-relations","45":"tag-rights","46":"tag-schooling","47":"tag-secondary","48":"tag-society","49":"tag-states","50":"tag-supreme","51":"tag-supreme-court-of-the-united-states","52":"tag-the","53":"tag-u0026","54":"tag-united","55":"tag-united-states","56":"tag-us","57":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}