Opinion ID: 2293326
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Statute of Limitations Governing Rehabilitation Act Claims

Text: As pertinent here, § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act provides that [n]o otherwise qualified individual with a disability... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, ... be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. [15] The Rehabilitation Act does not have its own statute of limitations, so courts must look elsewhere for the limitations period that applies to it. When the District moved for summary judgment, it argued that § 504 claims are subject to the federal statute of limitations that governs claims under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), namely, § 706 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [16] Because appellant's EEOC complaint was cross-filed with the OHR, § 706 of Title VII would dictate a limitations period of 300 days. [17] The trial court agreed with the District and applied the ADA/Title VII limitations period to appellant's Rehabilitation Act claim. However, the District now concedes, [18] and we agree, that it erred in urging the trial court to look to the ADA for the applicable statute of limitations. Although § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act adopts the applicable standards of liability set forth in the ADA, [19] § 505 specifies (in pertinent part) that [t]he remedies, procedures, and rights set forth in title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ... shall be available to any person aggrieved by any act or failure to act by any recipient of Federal assistance or Federal provider of such assistance under [§ 504 of the Rehabilitation Act]. [20] The Rehabilitation Act thus directs us to look first to the provisions of Title VI for the limitations period that governs claims under § 504. [21] Unfortunately, however, Title VI does not have its own statute of limitations either. [22] Furthermore, the general federal statute of limitations, 28 U.S.C. § 1658 (2006), does not apply to the Rehabilitation Act because it only governs actions arising under statutes passed after December 1, 1990. [23] When Congress has not established a time limitation for a federal cause of action, the settled practice has been to adopt a local time limitation as federal law if it is not inconsistent with federal law or policy to do so. [24] Our task, therefore, is to identify the District law most closely analogous to § 504 and borrow its limitations period, unless doing so would stymie the policies underlying the federal cause of action. [25] [T]he most analogous statute need not be identical to § 504 [26] ; federal statutes rarely have a precise mirror image in state law. To select the best fit, we are charged with identifying the essence of the claim embodied in the federal act and seeking out a District law that can be boiled down to the same or highly similar ingredients. [27] Two candidates in the District of Columbia Code present themselves: the three-year statute of limitations for personal injury claims, [28] and the one-year limitations period for complaints of unlawful discrimination under the HRA. [29] A majority of federal courts in other jurisdictions have chosen to apply the forum state's limitations periods for personal injury claims to claims of disability discrimination under § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. [30] Only rarely, however, has a federal court in these cases considered the option of applying a statute of limitations specific to a state anti-discrimination statute. For the most part, federal district court judges in our jurisdiction also have been drawn to the personal injury statute of limitations for § 504 actions (the D.C. Circuit not having had occasion to weigh in on the question), though it appears they have not considered the HRA statute of limitations as an alternative. [31] The rationale for choosing the limitations period governing personal injury claims is that the Rehabilitation Act is an anti-discrimination statute and, as the courts have recognized in borrowing state statutes of limitations for actions brought under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1983 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claims for discrimination are essentially claims for personal injury. [32] And even where a state statute affords a specific cause of action for discrimination comparable in scope to that of § 504, the state statute may not have a statute of limitations of its own that could be adopted. [33] Unlike § 1983, which is a `uniquely federal remedy ...' [that] can have no close counterpart in state statutes, [34] § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act can, and does, have counterparts in some states. A state anti-discrimination statute that furnishes a sufficiently broad cause of action for disability discrimination may be the most closely analogous state statute to § 504; the specific cause of action for disability discrimination would be a better fit than the more general personal injury cause of action. In that case, the state anti-discrimination statute's own limitations period would be the appropriate period to borrow for § 504 claims. The Fourth Circuit considered this possibility in Wolsky v. Medical College of Hampton Roads. [35] Finding that [t]he Virginia Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act was modeled after and is almost identical to the Rehabilitation Act, the Fourth Circuit held that the federal district court should have borrowed the Disabilities Act's one-year statute of limitations for a § 504 claim rather than the longer personal injury statute of limitations. [36] The appeals court was not deterred by the fact that the Disabilities Act was not an exact counterpart to the Rehabilitation Act because, the court explained, minor differences between state and federal statutes are acceptable and the most analogous statute need not be identical. [37] The Fourth Circuit followed Wolsky in McCullough v. Branch Banking & Trust Company, [38] affirming a decision to apply the 180-day statute of limitations in the North Carolina Handicapped Persons Protection Act to a claim under § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act rather than the three-year limitations period under the state's personal injury statute. The Handicapped Persons Protection Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, public accommodations, service, and transportation; although its language did not correspond to the Rehabilitation Act as precisely as the language of the Virginia Act, the North Carolina Act provide[d] similar protections to disabled individuals. [39] The court of appeals concluded that the Handicapped Persons Protection Act was more analogous to the Rehabilitation Act than other state laws, even though it was not a perfect counterpart because, among other things, it did not allow a jury trial or provide for full compensatory and punitive damages. [40] In addition, the court held, application of the 180-day statute of limitations is not inconsistent with the federal policies behind the Rehabilitation Act. [41] [A] short statute of limitations is not uncommon among federal civil rights statutes, the court explained (notably, both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the ADA have 180-day time bars), and it serves the goals of prompt notification ... and swift resolution of the conflict. [42] Moreover, the court reasoned, the federal policies behind the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act are similar, and it is unlikely that Congress, while enacting a 180-day time-bar for an ADA claim, would not approve of the same limitations period under the Rehabilitation Act. [43] The District of Columbia does not have a statute modeled on the Rehabilitation Act. But in lieu of such a narrowly focused statute, the District has the HRA, which expressly does prohibit discrimination based, inter alia, on disability. [44] We must decide whether the HRA is sufficiently similar to § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act that we should borrow the HRA statute of limitations rather than the default choice of the limitations period for personal injury claims. There are some substantive differences between the two Acts. Most obviously, while § 504 deals exclusively with disability-related discrimination, the HRA also prohibits discrimination based on a number of other characteristics, including race, national origin, gender, and sexual orientation. [45] And while § 504 applies only to programs or activities (whether governmental or private) that receive federal assistance (or that are conducted by an Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service), [46] the HRA, with limited exceptions, applies broadly to proscribe discrimination in employment, membership in labor unions, housing and real estate transactions, public accommodations, and educational institutions, as well as in and by the District of Columbia Government itself. [47] In our view, these differences pale in comparison to the similarities between the HRA and § 504. The similarities start with their shared purpose and ambitious aims: Just as the Rehabilitation Act seeks to empower individuals with disabilities to maximize employment, economic self-sufficiency, independence, and inclusion and integration into society, [48] the HRA aims to secure an end in the District of Columbia to discrimination for any reason other than that of individual merit. [49] To accomplish those ends, both statutes create private causes of action for individuals who have been victimized by disability discrimination. [50] In doing so, both statutes employ substantially the same definition of the term disability. [51] And the remedies available to prevailing plaintiffs under the HRA include compensatory damages and equitable relief and appear to be no less broad than the range of remedies available under § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. [52] There is not a perfect match, but these core similarities outweigh the differences in determining which statute of limitations to borrow for claims of disability discrimination under the Rehabilitation Act. Personal injury claims need notand, indeed, typically do notseek to remedy discrimination at all, and the three-year statute of limitations for such claims certainly was not chosen with discrimination claims in mind. In contrast, the HRA targets virtually all forms of disability discrimination, encompasses the range of activities covered by the Rehabilitation Act, and has a statute of limitations intended specifically for claims of discrimination. It is no objection that the HRA has broader coverage of discrimination than § 504 has. [53] Given the reality that perfect fits are rare, it is preferable that the state statute be overinclusive as opposed to underinclusive when lined up against the federal act in need of a borrowed statute of limitations. Significant underinclusiveness is problematic because a state statute is unlikely to be a good analogue if it is substantively lacking in a number of the causes of action encapsulated in the federal act in need. [54] But we do not perceive underinclusiveness to be a problem here. While there are claims that can be brought under the HRA but not under § 504for instance, claims for racial discrimination, or claims for disability discrimination in activities that are not federally fundedit strains the imagination to think of instances in which the reverse is true. In sum, a Rehabilitation Act claim is far more similar to an HRA claim than it is to an ordinary personal injury claim, and the HRA must be deemed the District statute most analogous to § 504. Having reached that conclusion, we must determine whether borrowing the HRA's one-year statute of limitations would be inconsistent with § 504 or the policies underlying it. It would not be. Although the HRA limitations period is shorter than the limitations period for personal injury claims, a short limitation period is by no means anomalous for a federal anti-discrimination claim [55] ; and a state statute cannot be considered `inconsistent' with federal law merely because the statute causes the plaintiff to lose the litigation. [56] Thus, we hold that the HRA's one-year statute of limitations governs § 504 claims in this jurisdiction. As a rule, when a court borrows a state limitations period for a federal cause of action, the court also must apply the state's rules for tolling the statute of limitations. [57] The rationale for doing so is that [i]n virtually all statutes of limitations the chronological length of the limitation period is interrelated with provisions regarding tolling, revival, and questions of application. Courts thus should not unravel state limitations rules unless their full application would defeat the goals of the federal statute at issue. [58] This rule and its rationale apply here. The HRA statute of limitations provides that [t]he timely filing of a complaint with the Office [of Human Rights] ... shall toll the running of the statute of limitations while the complaint is pending. [59] We have held that this tolling provision is triggered by the timely filing of a complaint with the EEOC, where the complaint is cross-filed with the OHR pursuant to the worksharing agreement between the two agencies. [60] The running of the statute of limitations resumes, in such a situation, when the EEOC (or the Department of Justice, if the case was referred to it by the EEOC for possible prosecution) issues a right-to-sue letter. [61]