Americans with Disabilities Act

The act opens with findings. Historically, Congress wrote, society had tended to isolate and segregate people with disabilities, and such discrimination remained a serious and pervasive social problem. The Americans with Disabilities Act, Public Law 101-336, was enacted on 26 July 1990. Its definition of disability was drawn almost word for word from rules under section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the ADA stated that it was not to be read as applying a lesser standard than that law.

Title I covered employers: at first those with 25 or more employees, and after two years those with 15 or more. Title II covered state and local governments and their agencies. Title III covered private businesses and nonprofits serving the public, and its list of public accommodations named the professional office of a health care provider and the hospital alongside banks, laundromats and museums.

Sidney Abbott, who had HIV but no serious symptoms, disclosed her infection at a dental examination. The dentist, Randon Bragdon, found a cavity and told her of his policy against filling cavities of HIV-infected patients in his office; he offered to do the work in a hospital, where she would pay for the use of its facilities. She sued under Title III. On 25 June 1998 the Supreme Court held, in an opinion by Justice Kennedy, that her infection was a disability under the ADA even though it had not reached the symptomatic phase. It sent the case back because the appeals court had not cited enough evidence to rule out a direct threat to the health of others.

A year later the Court turned to Title II. L. C., one of two women who sued Georgia health officials, was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric unit at Georgia Regional Hospital at Atlanta in May 1992. By May 1993 her treatment team agreed that a community program could meet her needs, but she stayed in the hospital until February 1996. In Olmstead v. L.C., decided on 22 June 1999, Justice Ginsburg's opinion held that unjustified isolation is discrimination based on disability. States must place people in community settings when their treatment professionals find it appropriate, the person does not object, and the placement can be reasonably accommodated given state resources and the needs of others with mental disabilities.