Court Opinion

ID: 9540756
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:19:37.461966+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:00:16.849337
License: Public Domain

LEVY, J.,
with whom SAUFLEY, C.J., joins, dissenting.
[¶ 46] Section 4553(7-A) is not a model of legislative clarity. It consists of a sin*319gle, seventy-seven word run-on sentence that contains thirteen commas and employs the disjunctive “or” eight times.
[¶ 47] The Court interprets this challenging statute categorically, finding within it three separate definitions of “physical or mental disability.” It does so in the face of a sentence that does not contain any textual signals, such as numbers, letters, parentheses, semi-colons or other punctuation, that one might expect to find when a legislative body seeks to establish, in one sentence, three separate definitions for a single term.
[¶ 48] Contrary to the Court’s view that the history of the adoption and interpretation of the Maine Human Rights Act’s definition of disability “leaves no ambiguity for interpretation,” supra ¶28, I believe the opposite is true. The interpretive history recounted by the Court sheds more fog than light on its subject, except, perhaps, in one respect: There is no historical evidence that the Legislature intended to create not one but three separate definitions for the term “physical or mental disability.”
[¶ 49] As more fully explained by Justice Clifford, section 4553(7-A) is an ambiguous statute. Accordingly, we should defer to the expertise of the Maine Human Rights Commission and respect the interpretive rule it has employed for more than twenty years to protect persons with disabilities from employment discrimination.