WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Stanley v. City of Sanford, a case in which the Court considered whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects against disability discrimination with respect to retirement benefits distributed after employment, Constitutional Accountability Center Senior Appellate Counsel Miriam Becker-Cohen issued the following reaction:

This case presented the question whether a retired employee who does not hold or seek a job is a “qualified individual” who may experience actionable discrimination under Title I of the ADA. Answering that question required the Court to untangle a complicated statutory puzzle.

Rather than acknowledge the ambiguity of the law’s text and use statutory context to understand its meaning, the majority read the definition of “qualified individual” in isolation and fixated on verb tense at the expense of ordinary meaning. The result, it declared, is that a retiree is never a “qualified individual,” meaning the ADA allows employers to engage in post-employment discrimination. That makes little sense, sharply limits relief for people with disabilities, and is at odds with the proper approach to statutory interpretation.

To be sure, the Court today did leave open a potential path to relief for retirees who became “subject to” discriminatory fringe-benefits policies while they were both disabled and still held their jobs. But as Justice Jackson explained in her dissenting opinion, the Court was wrong to refuse to adopt that path in the current posture of this case. Lt. Stanley spent years serving her community dutifully and developed Parkinson’s disease in the line of duty. She should not now have to wait years to have her claims vindicated.

CAC Senior Appellate Counsel Smita Ghosh added this reaction:

As our brief on behalf of Lt. Stanley explained, Congress enacted the ADA in response to years of advocacy—including countless hearings and a 28-hour sit-in at a government office—from Americans with disabilities seeking equal access to all the benefits of employment. Although the Court’s conservative supermajority chided Lt. Stanley for invoking the ADA’s purpose, the law’s history, as Justice Jackson explained, “helps us to understand—not override” the statute’s text. Read alongside this history, the ADA’s text makes clear that it does not allow employers to discriminate against employees with disabilities before or after they retire.