Opinion ID: 3017184
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Standard Adopted by the District Court

Text: Collins claims that her impairment, ADHD/ADD, substantially limits her major life activities of thinking, learning, concentrating or remembering.2 She argues that the district court applied an incorrect standard is assessing the substantial limiting effect of her impairment.3 The district court looked to “whether [Collins’] physical or mental condition precluded or severely restricted or limited [her] in thinking, concentrating, learning and remembering.” Collins contends that this “preclusion” standard created an impossibly high burden. She argues: 2 In Taylor v. Phoenixville School District, we held that thinking is a major life activity. 184 F.3d at 307. In Gagliardo v. Connaught Laboratories, Inc., 311 F.3d 545, 569 (3d Cir. 2002), we held that general cognitive functions, such as concentrating and remembering, are major life activities. 3 Collins was not diagnosed with ADHD/ADD until two months after she was terminated by Prudential for poor job performance. Nevertheless, we will address the merits of her appeal. 5 If you use the district court’s standard of “preclusion” to obtain disability status, than (sic) no employee could ever have a disability claim against an employer because he would not be able perform (sic) the essential functions of the position. Being precluded from thinking, learning, concentrating, or remembering, would not allow an employee to work, let alone function in society. Collins believes that she merely had to produce sufficient evidence to allow a reasonable jury to find that she was “substantially limited” in her cognitive functions. She does not explain what means by “substantially limited” in her cognitive functions, and she also ignores the Supreme Court’s explanation of that phrase. In Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams, 534 U.S. 184 (2002), the Court explained: that to be substantially limited in performing manual tasks,4 an individual must have an impairment that prevents or severely restricts the individual from doing activities that are of central importance to most people’s daily lives. Id. at 198 (emphasis added). An impairment that “prevents or severely restricts” activities precludes one from satisfactorily completing them, and we therefore fail to see any material distinction between the district court’s alleged “preclusion” test, and the Supreme Court’s analysis in Williams. 4 Admittedly, in Williams the person asserting the disability had a manual impairment, i.e., carpal tunnel syndrome, and not a mental one, i.e., ADHD/ADD, as Collins claims to have. However, since the ADA defines “disability” as a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of [an] individual,” we see no reason why the definition of substantially limited in Williams would not apply to mental impairments. 6