Court Opinion

ID: 9592636
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:15:55.764053+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:06:56.786441
License: Public Domain

DENNIS JACOBS, Chief Judge,
dissenting in part:
I respectfully dissent as to the statutory standing of Kristy and Bobby Loeffler to bring associational discrimination claims *284against the Hospital under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (“RA”).
The RA provides that “[n]o otherwise qualified individual with a disability ... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, [i] be excluded from, the participation in, [ii] be denied the benefits of, or [iii] be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 29 U.S.C. § 794(a) (emphases added). The next section provides a private right of action: “The remedies, procedures, and rights set forth in title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.) ... 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 section 794 of this title.” 29 U.S.C. § 794a(a)(2).
The majority reads the phrase “any person aggrieved” in § 794a(a)(2) to mean that an RA associational claim may be pled even by someone who is not herself “excluded from [ ] participation in” or “denied the benefits of’ anything that the RA guarantees.1 As I undertake to demonstrate in four Points, the majority is expanding the RA in a way that is unsupported by precedent (I), text (II), logic (III), and prudence (IV).
I
Federal courts have long recognized that the phrase “any person aggrieved” supports claims for “associational discrimination” under the RA. In the first such case, a woman (not disabled) sued an airline that had refused to board her disabled husband, with whom she was traveling. Nodleman v. Aero Mexico, 528 F.Supp. 475, 479-80 (C.D.Cal.1981). The court declined to dismiss her associational claim because the RA’s “use of the phrase ‘any person aggrieved’ ... evinces a congressional intention to define standing to bring a private action under Section 504 as broadly as is permitted by Article III of the Constitution.” Id. at 485.
We recognized standing to assert a claim for associational discrimination under the RA in Innovative Health Sys., Inc. v. City of White Plains, 117 F.3d 37, 46-48 (2d Cir.1997). An addiction rehabilitation center challenged the denial of a zoning permit, alleging that the city was discriminating against the center’s patients. Id. at 47. We relied particularly on Nodleman, and the “broad language” of the RA’s enforcement provision. Id.
The scope of the term “any person aggrieved” is not apparent from the text of the RA itself, but it cannot be altogether limitless. Crucially, in both Nodleman and Innovative Health Sys., the plaintiffs themselves were excluded from participation in a program, or were denied services, or were discriminated against (albeit on the basis of their association with disabled persons). The plaintiffs in these cases were not “otherwise qualified indi*285vidual[s] with a disability!,]” but the wife (excluded from the plane) and the rehabilitation center (denied a permit) were aggrieved in the same manner and for the same reasons as an “otherwise qualified individual with a disability” under § 794(a): they were “excluded from the participation in, [ ] denied the benefits of, or [] subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 29 U.S.C. § 794(a).
The decisive distinction in our case is that the Loeffler children were never excluded from participation, denied services, or subjected to discrimination. They assisted their parents in coping with an alleged violation of the RA without themselves being denied services. They may well have been injured, forced to interpret for their parents, and made to miss school (among other injuries), but the RA does not confer standing on account of these types of injuries.
A survey of cases under the ADA shows that courts have generally adhered to this distinction (implicitly or explicitly), and conferred standing as a “person aggrieved” only in cases where a plaintiff has actually been excluded, denied, or subjected to discrimination in the receipt of services. For instance, in Popovich v. Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Div., 150 Fed.Appx. 424, 427 (6th Cir.2005)(per curiam), a daughter who was the subject of custody proceedings (brought by her disabled father) sued an Ohio court, alleging that the court’s failure to accommodate her father’s disability caused delays that deprived her of her father’s companionship for five years. The Sixth Circuit rejected her claim: “Unlike the treatment centers in Innovative Health Sys. and MX Group, both of which were denied permits to operate, Lauren Popovich has not been denied access to or participation in any of the public services covered by Title II.” Id. at 427. She may have been aggrieved, but she was not denied services.
Similarly, in Simenson v. Hoffman, No. 95 C 1401, 1995 WL 631804, at *2 (N.D.I11. Oct.24, 1995), a doctor refused to treat a disabled child, and screamed at the parents to get out of his office. The district court dismissed the parents’ claim for associational discrimination on' the ground that the parents were not denied services: “denial of admission to a movie theater or a hotel constitutes a separate injury because the companion is denied the use of the service or facility. The [parents] were not at the medical center for any purpose other than to seek treatment for [the child]. [The child’s] ejection, and that of his parents, was merely the final act in the decision to deny [the child] medical treatment.” 1995 WL 631804, at *6. See also Glass v. Hillsboro School Dist. 1J, 142 F.Supp.2d 1286, 1292 (D.Or.2001) (noting that to prevail on a theory of associational discrimination, the plaintiffs “must allege and prove that they ... were discriminated against in obtaining those services solely because they were associated with disabled individuals”) (emphasis added).
II
The plain text of the RA — “any person aggrieved” (§ 794a (a)(2)) — is expansive, and the majority’s reading might be defensible but for a subsequent indication of congressional intent.
We know that Congress meant to incorporate certain “standards” and judicial interpretations of the RA into the later-adopted Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, (“ADA”), 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101-12213. See, e.g., 42 U.S.C. § 12201(a); H.R.Rep. No. 101-485, at 84 (1990), as reprinted in 1990 U.S.C.C.A.N. 267, 367; Collings v. Longview Fibre Co., 63 F.3d 828, 832 n. 3 (9th Cir.1995) (noting that “Congress intended judicial interpretation of the Rehabilitation Act be incorporated by reference *286when interpreting the ADA”); McDonald v. Commonwealth of Pa., Dep’t of Pub. Welfare, 62 F.3d 92, 95 (3d Cir.1995) (“Whether suit is filed under the Rehabilitation Act or under the Disabilities Act, the substantive standards for determining liability are the same.”).2 When Congress enacted the ADA, it thus clarified the standing requirement that associated persons be themselves actually excluded or denied, and thereby unambiguously limited the breadth of “any person aggrieved.”
For example, Title I of the ADA (concerning employment discrimination against qualified individuals with a disability), prohibits employers from “[ejxcluding or otherwise denying equal jobs or benefits to a qualified individual because of the known disability of an individual with whom the qualified individual is known to have a relationship or association.” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(b)(4) (emphases added). An associated person has a claim only if she herself suffers an actual adverse employment action. See generally Den Hartog v. Wasatch Acad., 129 F.3d 1076, 1085 (10th Cir.1997) (plaintiff alleging that he was fired due to son’s disability must allege that he himself was “subjected to adverse employment action”); Larimer v. Int’l Bus. Machines Corp., 370 F.3d 698, 700-02 (7th Cir.2004) (same).
Title II of the ADA (concerning public entities and public transportation) contains no express associational discrimination provision,3 but its implementing regulations provide: “A public entity shall not exclude or otherwise deny equal services, programs, or activities to an individual or entity because of the known disability of an individual with whom the individual or entity is known to have a relationship or association.” 28 C.F.R. § 35.130(g) (emphases added).4
Title III of the ADA (concerning public accommodation) prohibits discriminatory conduct against associated persons thus: “It shall be discriminatory to exclude or otherwise deny equal goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, accommodations, or other opportunities to an individual or entity because of the known disability of an individual with whom the individual or entity is known to have a relationship or association.” 42 U.S.C. § 12182(b)(1)(E) (emphases added).
Each of these ADA provisions imposes an unambiguous statutory standing requirement that an associated person be actually excluded or denied due to their association.
The evidence suggests that Congress interpreted the RA the same way. Under *287the ADA’s general rule of construction, “nothing in this chapter shall be construed to apply a lesser standard than the standards applied under title V of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.” 42 U.S.C. § 12201(a).5 If “standard” is construed broadly, as it is evidently used and intended, it subsumes statutory standing. It then follows ineluctably that Congress understood, its ADA wording to be congruent with the proper construction of its earlier language in the RA.
Reading the RA and ADA together, as Congress clearly intended us to do, associational claims require an exclusion or denial of services.
Ill
The majority’s wide interpretation of “any person aggrieved” has no evident limiting principle, as can be illustrated in the hospital context. Relatives and friends of patients routinely provide additional or complementary services to patients. Once a breach of duty is found under the RA, everybody and his mother (literally) will be able to submit a bill for services and injuries. A friend lifts a wheelchair up a few stairs when there is no ramp, and is injured; a relative prepares a gluten-free meal that a hospital lacks resources to provide, and thereby incurs expense, or gets burned on the stove; a sister stays up all night to cheer the patient and translate from Dutch as needed, and suffers the trauma of a flatlining.
If the RA supported all these claims flowing from an initial act of discrimination, a hospital’s liability would never end. And the hospital might have to pay twice or many times over for each service it failed to afford.6 If this were the law, the RA would in that respect grant more extensive remedies to associated persons than to persons with disabilities themselves: only the disabled would actually have to be excluded, denied, or subjected to discrimination in order to recover damages.
IV
Claims of the kind that the majority opinion recognizes create intractable administrative problems for judges and juries. The Loeffler son alleges that he was injured because he was drafted into service as an interpreter,7 that he was forced to miss school to be present at the hospital, and that because he was in the recovery room (after the doctor had left and translation duty ended) he was present when his father had a stroke. But the *288young man would in any event have run the risk of being present when his father had a stroke — unless he claims that he would not have visited the hospital at all as his father lay dying. Moreover, I do not see how, in showing injury or calculating damages, the trauma of translating at the hospital can be teased apart from the overarching and subsuming trauma of having a father who was dying over time from a heart condition and a stroke. Difficulties of this nature may be one reason why this case, originally filed in 1995, is still in progress, with no prospect of resolution.
For these reasons, I conclude that the district court properly dismissed the children’s claims for associational discrimination under the RA. In any event, the majority opinion does not prejudge the analogous question under the

. In passing, the majority suggests that the children themselves may have been denied a service guaranteed under the RA because they were denied a translator. But this is surely odd, because, as persons with normal hearing, they needed no translator — which is of course the whole premise of their claim.
The majority opinion tweaks the argument by saying they were denied "adequate sign language interpretation” because they had to translate "complicated medical terms” that they did not understand, (emphasis added). But that deprivation comes down to a single medical term (“stroke”). See infm at n. 7. Certainly the children cannot contend that they needed a superior translator at bedside to explain their father’s condition since [i] with normal hearing, they did not need ASL to communicate with the doctor, [ii] if they did not understand “stroke" when it was spoken, they would not have understood it when it was translated in ASL by someone who did, and [iii] their main point is that they would not have been with their father in the hospital if any other translator had been present.

. After passage of the ADA, the RA was amended in part to codify the congruence. See, e.g., 29 U.S.C. § 794(d) ("The standards used to determine whether this section has been violated in a complaint alleging employment discrimination under this section shall be the standards applied under title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.”).

. We nevertheless held in Innovative Health Sys. that Title II supports claims for associational discrimination. See 117 F.3d at 47 (“According to the [defendant], because Title II does not contain similar language, Congress intended to prevent standing based on association under this section. Although courts generally should be reluctant to conclude that the omission of language in one part of a statute that is included in another is unintentional, ... there is extensive support in this instance to read the specific examples of discrimination from the other two titles into Title II.”).

. As noted in Innovative Health Sys., the preamble to 28 C.F.R. § 35.130(g) explains: "This provision was intended to ensure that entities such as health care providers, employees of social service agencies, and others who provide professional services to persons with disabilities are not subjected to discrimination because of their professional association with persons with disabilities.” 28 C.F.R. pt. 35, app. A at 470 (emphasis added).

. The legislative history of § 12201 explains: "This section explains the relationship between section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and [the Americans with Disabilities] Act.” H.R.Rep. No. 101-485, at 44 (1990), as reprinted in 1990 U.S.C.C.A.N. 267, 288.

. The central purpose of the anti-discrimination statutes is to deter discrimination before it occurs — not necessarily to provide full and adequate compensation for harms that are at best tangentially related to the deprivation suffered by a person with disabilities. The preamble to the Americans with Disabilities Act states: "It is the purpose of this chapter[] to provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities.” 42 U.S.C. § 12101(b)(1). If the goal were to yield compensation, the recovery of money damages would not be conditioned on proof of intentional discrimination. See Bartlett v. N.Y. State Bd. of Law Exam'rs, 156 F.3d 321, 331 (2d Cir.1998) (under the RA and ADA, monetary damages are recoverable only upon a showing of an intentional violation), vacated on other grounds and remanded, 527 U.S. 1031, 119 S.Ct. 2388, 144 L.Ed.2d 790 (1999).

. He claims he suffered stress because he could not think of the sign for "stroke” when he was translating the doctor's diagnosis for his mother. No doubt, the situation was inherently stressful, but the incremental stress could have been alleviated by use of a pad and pencil.