Seyfarth Synopsis: Are web-only businesses subject to Title III? A Minnesota federal court joins the controversy and says yes.
Courts around the country are split on the issue of whether a “place of public accommodation” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act must have a physical location where it serves the public. A federal trial court in Minnesota recently denied a web-only business’s motion to dismiss, ruling that web-only businesses are covered by Title III, siding with the courts that have concluded that no physical place is required.
Recognizing the disagreement among federal appellate and trial courts on this issue, as well as the fact that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (within which the District of Minnesota sits) has not opined on the issue, the Court went to great lengths to justify its decision that a “public accommodation” does not have to be a physical place.
First, the Court sought to distinguish the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuit decisions finding that public accommodations are limited to “physical structures” by stating that those cases were about whether the ADA applied to the content of insurance policies, not websites.
Second, the Court stated that those courts had “allowed the canon of noscitur a sociis to play too great a role in their analysis.” This cannon of statutory construction states that a word is known by the company it keeps and is used to interpret ambiguous words. The Court insisted that the application of this rule “ignores the maxim that a remedial statute should be read broadly” and runs counter to the “ADA’s intent, which Congress enacted ‘to eliminate discrimination against disabled individuals, and to integrate them into the economic and social mainstream of American life.’”
Third, the Court gave no weight to the dictionary definition of the word “place” in the phrase “place of public accommodation” because that definition, in the Court’s view, was “inconclusive.”
Fourth, the Court noted that Congress’ failure to amend the ADA to explicitly include websites should not be construed as Congress’s intention to exclude websites. To the contrary, the Court posited that the lack of legislative action could be interpreted as an understanding that no amendment is required to cover online-only businesses.
The bottom line is that the Court found the exclusion of online-only businesses from the ADA’s coverage inconsistent with the ADA’s mandate to ensure equal access for individuals with disabilities to businesses’ goods and services, noting that shopping via retail websites is not meaningfully different from shopping at physical stores.
While we have yet to see other district courts in the Eighth Circuit weigh in on this issue, this decision may spark a trend of web accessibility lawsuits in Minnesota and the Eighth Circuit, as we have seen from plaintiff-friendly rulings in New York.
