ADA Amendments Act of 2008 - Reasons For Enactment

Reasons For Enactment

Congress used the functional definition of disability from Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Due to 17 years of development through case law, Congress believed the requirements of the definition were well understood. Within the framework established under the Rehabilitation Act, courts treated the determination of disability as a threshold issue, but focused primarily on whether unlawful discrimination had occurred. After the passage of the ADA, the focus of court decisions shifted to deciding if people's claims of discrimination were protected by the law.

The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 was intended to overturn two decisions which interpreted the ADA and sparked controversy. The first decision made by the Supreme Court in Sutton v. United Airlines stated that impairments must be considered in their mitigated state. The second decision in Toyota v. Williams stated that the standard for determining whether an individual was eligible for protection under the law must be demanding. The follow on effect of this in some lower court findings was that an individual’s impairment did not constitute a disability and in many cases courts never reached the question whether discrimination had occurred.

Through these rulings, the Supreme Court and lower courts created a situation in which individuals with physical or mental impairments that affected them significantly enough to have been considered "substantially limiting a major life activity" under the case law interpreting the Rehabilitation Act were not considered as qualifying for protection under the ADA. These included individuals with impairments such as amputation, intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, muscular dystrophy, and cancer.