Seventeen years ago in Maddox v. University of Tennessee, 62 F.3d 843 (6th Cir. 1995), the Sixth Circuit got off on the wrong track with regard to the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) by adopting a "solely" because of causation standard imported from the Rehabilitation Act. This admittedly "wrong" decision was one of many erroneous judicially-imposed limits on the ADA that led Congress to amend the ADA in 2008 in order to correct a number of misguided decisions.
The Sixth Circuit finally got around to correcting its error in Lewis v. Humboldt Acquisition Corp, No 09-6381 (May 25, 2012)(en banc), where it ruled that the ADA's prohibition on discrimination "because of" an individual's disability required in ADA plaintiff to prove that the relevant discrimination would not have occurred "but for" the individual's disability.
Robert L. Abell
www.RobertAbellLaw.com
