Supreme Court prevents retired firefighter from suing former employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act

The Supreme Court on Friday shut down efforts by a retired Florida firefighter to sue her former employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act. By a vote of 8-1, the justices ruled that Karyn Stanley, who was forced to retire in 2018 because of Parkinson’s disease, cannot challenge the termination of her health insurance after she retired.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, writing that the court’s decision “renders meaningless” the protections provided in the ADA “for disabled workers’ retirement benefits just when those protections matter most.”

Stanley joined the fire department in Sanford, Florida, in 1999 and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016. Two years later, at the age of 47, she took disability retirement. Under the policy in effect when she started with the fire department, the city would have covered just over 75% of her monthly insurance premium until she was 65 – just as it would have done if she had retired after 25 years on the job. But in 2003, the city changed its policy. It continues to cover firefighters who retire after 25 years of service until they reach the age of 65. But firefighters like Stanley who retire on disability only receive the subsidy for two years or until they become eligible for Medicare.

Stanley went to federal court, where she argued that the city’s policy discriminates against her based on her disability and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The lower courts dismissed Stanley’s case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reasoned that because Stanley did not work for the city and did not want to work for the city when it ended her retirement benefits, she could not bring a claim under the ADA.

In a splintered opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court on Friday upheld that ruling. The ADA, Gorsuch wrote, bars employment discrimination “‘against a qualified individual on the basis of disability in regard to . . . compensation’ and other matters.” The law in turn “defines a ‘qualified individual’” as someone who, “without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such individual holds or desires.”

Gorsuch pointed to several clues in the text of the law that, he said, indicated that the phrase “qualified individual” does not extend to retirees like Stanley. First, he noted, Congress used present-tense verbs, which suggests that the phrase applies only to individuals who can or want to do the job when they are the victims of discrimination. “Conversely,” he wrote, “those verbs tend to suggest that the statute does not reach retirees who neither hold nor desire a job at the time of an alleged act of discrimination.”

The ADA’s definition of the kinds of “reasonable accommodation[s]” that may help an employee to do a job reinforces this interpretation, Gorsuch continued, because it “refers to things like ‘job restructuring,’ modifying ‘existing facilities used by employees,’ and altering ‘training materials or policies.’” Although such accommodations might “make perfect sense when it comes to current employees or applicants,” Gorsuch posited, “it is hard to see how they might apply to retirees who do not hold or seek a job.”

Moreover, Gorsuch added, the Supreme Court itself has held that if a plaintiff in an ADA case indicates that she cannot work, she cannot show that she is a “qualified individual with a disability,” as required for her case to move forward.

The majority’s conclusion that retirees like Stanley are not “qualified individuals” for purposes of the ADA, Gorsuch observed, does not prevent Congress from amending the ADA so that it applies to them. “But the decision whether to do so lies with that body,” Gorsuch stressed, “not this one.” And retirees who contend that they are the victims of disability-based discrimination may be able to rely on other laws – such as state law and the Rehabilitation Act – to bring their claims.

Six justices – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – joined this part of the Gorsuch opinion, making it the opinion for the court and a binding precedent.

Three justices – Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Kagan – joined the third and final part of Gorsuch’s opinion, which left the door open for other retirees in situations similar to Stanley’s to bring claims under the ADA.

Stanley had argued that even if the ADA’s definition of “qualified individual” only applies to, and protects, people who hold or seek a job when they are the victims of discrimination based on their disability, her lawsuit still could go forward. First, she said, when the city adopted its new and allegedly discriminatory policy in 2003, she was still working as a firefighter. But the four justices rejected that argument in Stanley’s case, noting that “her complaint suggests that, when the City first issued its policy, she was not disabled and still expected to complete 25 years of service.” But “others who happen to be retired at the time they sue” may be able to bring a claim on this basis, the four justices acknowledged, “if they can plead and prove they were disabled and ‘qualified’ when their employer adopted a discriminatory retirement-benefits policy.”

Second, Stanley had contended that she was the victim of discrimination when her subsidized health insurance ran out in 2020. Here too, Gorsuch wrote, because Stanley had been retired for two years, she could not rely on this theory. “But, once more, it might help others who can show that they were affected by a policy change while they were ‘qualified individuals,’ even if they happen to be retired by the time they bring suit.”

And although Stanley may have an argument that she was “subject to” an “allegedly discriminatory benefits policy” during the window between her diagnosis in 2016 and her retirement in 2018, Gorsuch said, she “affirmatively disavowed” that argument in her brief in the lower court, and the court of appeals declined to reach it.

Thomas wrote a brief opinion concurring in part and in the judgment, joined by Barrett, in which he voiced “concern with the increasingly common practice of litigants urging this Court to grant certiorari to resolve one question, and then, after we do so, pivoting to an entirely different question.”

Sotomayor also wrote a brief opinion concurring in part and in the judgment. She disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of the scope of the phrase “qualified individual,” but she agreed that plaintiffs like Stanley “can plead disability discrimination if they were ‘subject to a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice’ while a qualified individual within the majority’s understanding of that term.” And she further agreed that Stanley’s case could not go forward on this theory, “especially because Stanley herself did not ask this Court to review the Eleventh Circuit’s holding that she had forfeited this theory before that court.”

In her dissent, Jackson called the majority’s decision “counterintuitive.” The “qualified individual” definition, she argued, was “designed to protect employers from having to employ those who cannot do the work, not to cut off the rights of those who already finished it.” In reaching its conclusion, she said, the majority “overlooks both the actual facts presented in this case and the clear design of the ADA.”