Dude, did you even read the link, or do you just like vomiting talking points?

First of all, this has nothing to do with judges, activist or otherwise. The cases metioned were two settlements. That means the parties involved sat down and came to an agreement about what the law said.

Second, if you actually bother to read the ADA, you would know that both the "reasonable" portion of the "reasonable accomodations" test, and the "undue burden" exception which protects defendants, expressly protects them against accomodations which would be too expensive. The Supreme Court has been very unfriendly to the disabled in this area, very broadly interpreting what is an "undue burden."

In other words, you would do well not to write about what you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

"The lawsuit demanded that the theaters were violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captioning accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons. In 2003, the court denied the defendants' motion for summary judgment arguing that the theaters were not required under the ADA to provide captions."

Yeah, that sounds amicable.

You're changing the subject.

No one said the plaintiffs and defendants in this suit liked each other. What I said was that the parties reached this result through settlement, not through litigation. Furthermore, the passage you quoted also reveals your total ignorance of the law. A "summary judgment motion" is a motion which occurs very early in a trial, and is only granted if no reasonable jury could possible rule in favor of the other guy, no matter how outrageous the evidence. It is a very difficult motion to win. By denying this motion, all the judge did was concede that there was a snowball's chance in hell that the plaintiffs were right.

The basic problem with your original post is that it relies on two mutually exclusive talking points. One is that the ADA, which was passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, is a "hideous" law. The other is that rights not granted by law are being extended to the disabled because of "activist judges." You can't have it both ways. Either the legislature was wrong to pass the law, or the judges are misinterpreting the law.

I don't agree with 100% of what Lemon has said, but I have litigated a few ADA cases, and if one of my clients came to me with the facts of this case, I would view it as my ethical duty to advise them to settle.

The reason why is because the equipment involved here is fairly inexpensive, and it would actually cost more to pay me to defend this suit than it would to shake hands on it.

There are some bad ADA cases out there. This is not one of them.

Lemon,

I think you might be a little too emotionally invested in this case.

Ravenwood, I'm a little disappointed by your response here. Lemon made a substantive legal argument, and you respond by making him out to be some kind of basketcase?

Lemon does seem fairly invested in his opinions, but far less than you must be in yours to not even consider the substance of his arguments.

I'm curious Mike, what parts of Lemon's analysis do you not agree with?

Mike,

Lemon has said that I'm "vomiting talking points" and "have no fucking clue". I tried rebutting his point and he told me that I'm showing "total ignorance of the law".

His good legal argument aside, I don't think he's prepared to listen to what I have to say so I'm not going to waste my breath.

Well, to answer both Jenn & Raven's points. I don't agree with the tone Lemon took, but he is right. Ravenwood has demonstrated "total ignorance" at least with respect to the law surrounding the ADA.

I always liked ``What's New Tiger Lily?'' and the genre offers the entertainment opportunity of the year now. Go to the theater to read the captions.

The basic problem is illustrated right here: "it would actually cost more to pay me to defend this suit than it would to shake hands on it." That is, in practice the law allows them to demand unreasonable accomodations and to probably get them, because fighting the case costs too much (and because we don't have a loser-pays system in the USA).

Of course, that isn't the activist judge problem that Ravenwood talked about. Actually, it's an inactive judge problem - one that was inclined to rewrite the laws might have ruled differently.

Mark, you misinterpret my comment.

The technology involved here is cheap. Very cheap. About $10,000 to install in a theatre, which, when spread across several thousand customers on many, many evenings, ads up to a virtual zero cost (in fact the actual cost may be zero, when you consider that deaf patrons will now visit the theatre, thus increasing overall sales).

The purpose of the "reasonableness" prong of the ADA and the "undue burden" prong Lemon mentioned above is to prevent outrageous awards which would endager the burdened defendant. If the court had held, for example, that special theatres must be constructed at each location simply for the benefit of deaf customers, that would be an unreasonable accomodation under the ADA, and a judge would be wrong to impose it.

What's most objectionable about your comment however, Mark, is that a loser pays system would have the effect of chilling the most vunerable plaintiffs from bring necessary suits. A person fired from their job as a receptionist who is fired for being black, or for being a woman, or for refusing to have sex with her boss would be very reluctant to bring suit if she knew a loss would mean hundreds of thousands in legal fees. By enacting a loser-pays system, you are functionally repealing every civil rights law which provides a private cause of action.

What are system does possess, and rightfully so, is a means of sanctioning frivilous lawsuits. But this was not a frivilous suit. In fact this is exactly the kind of access barrier Congress intended to remedy in the ADA, and exactly the kind of affordable accomodation Congress hoped would result. As I said before, there are bad suits under the ADA, but this is not one of them.

It is also not a valid attack on the ADA to say that Congress should not be imposing these constraints on businesses. Other laws already require that movie theatres be structurally sound, that they have sufficent fire escapes, and that they admit all patrons regardless of race. Obeying the law is part of living in society, and the cost of obeying the ADA is actually quite negligiable when compared to overall corporate profits.

If you read the text of the law, you will see that Congress passed it because of their finding that by improving access for the disabled, it would actually stimulate the economy by adding to the workforce and the consumer pool. Movie theatres will continue to thrive after this settlement, and frivilous suits will continue to be dismissed and sanctioned. This thing is a drop in the bucket, and it is disappointing that so many Americans are so willing to degrade the law because it protects people who aren't like them.

Michael Teamson,
"the cost of obeying the ADA is actually quite negligiable when compared to overall corporate profits"
Poppycock. High "overall [corporate] profits" are cold comfort to owners who have been driven out of business by greedy "victims" and bottom-feeding lawyers. Returning to theaters, this decision forces every theater, regardles of its current economic condition, to spend thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars on new equipment. How do you know how many customers ALL affected theaters are getting?
Your sly conflation of laws mandating structural soundness with laws, benefiting everyone, with legal requirements benefitting hearing-impaired people unwilling to wait for movies to appear on DVD is transparent sophistry.
"Obeying the law is part of living in society"
"If you read the text of the law, you will see ..."
You can stop shaking your finger now. If YOU read "The death of common sense", by Phillip K Howard, you will learn about several outrageous cases in which the ADA has been turned into a new lawyer's bonanza. For example, a municipal hockey stadium in, I believe, Cleveland, whose scorer's booth was accessible only from the ice, was forced to widen the door between the rink and the booth to make the booth wheelchair-accessible.
There is a problem with frivolous lawsuits in this country, Michael, as you know, and the harder lawyers defend the current system with bullshit and prolix hand-waving, the harder it will go with them when the voters force some common sense back into the legal system.
Daniel Day

I just hate closed captions. I always find myself reading those damned subtitles rather than actually watching the movie. Fuck the ADA!

If Kerry wins this is only the beginning. With Larry Tribe and others of his ilk on the Court we are gonna have unisex toilets, quotas for homosexuals, and each soldier is gonna get a vote to see if they want to go into battle or not. I am not kidding. This would be the end of America as we know it. Vote Bush!

Whoa Steve.

I read Kos daily. Getting linked from Kos is the big-time!

Of course, the downside is that thousands more people can see what a fucking moron you are.