The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (Public Law 110–325, ADAAA) is an Act of Congress, effective January 1, 2009, that amended the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and other disability nondiscrimination laws at the Federal level of the United States.
Passed on September 17, 2008, and signed into law by President George W. Bush on September 25, 2008, the ADAAA was a response to a number of decisions by the Supreme Court that had interpreted the original text of the ADA. Because members of the U.S. Congress viewed those decisions as limiting the rights of persons with disabilities, the ADAAA effectively reversed those decisions by changing the law. It also rejected portions of the regulations published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that interpret Title I (the employment-related title) of the ADA. The ADAAA makes changes to the definition of the term "disability," clarifying and broadening that definition—and therefore the number and types of persons who are protected under the ADA and other Federal disability nondiscrimination laws. It was designed to strike a balance between employer and employee interests.
The ADAAA requires that courts interpreting the ADA and other Federal disability nondiscrimination laws focus on whether the covered entity has discriminated, rather than whether the individual seeking the law's protection has an impairment that fits within the technical definition of the term "disability." The Act retains the ADA's basic definition of "disability" as an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; a record of such an impairment; or being regarded as having such an impairment. However, it changes the way that the statutory terms should be interpreted.
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.
Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 to overturn two controversial court decisions based on interpretations of the ADA. The first decision—by the Supreme Court in Sutton v. United Air Lines, Inc.—stated that impairments must be considered in their mitigated state. The second decision in Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams narrowed the definition of "disability" to just those impairments that impact tasks of daily living. In following these decisions, lower courts would frequently focus on whether the plaintiff was, in fact, disabled and never reach the issue of whether discrimination had occurred.
Through these rulings, the Supreme Court and lower courts created a situation in which an individual with a physical or mental impairment severe enough to constitute a "substantially limiting a major life activity" under case law based on the Rehabilitation Act did not qualify 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.
Push for changes
In 2004, the National Council on Disability, an independent Federal agency charged with making recommendations to the President and Congress, issued a report called "Righting the ADA." This report detailed various ways that the courts had misinterpreted Congressional intent and limited the reach of the ADA, and proposed legislative language to restore that intent. The most important misinterpretation the report identified was the narrowing of the ADA's definition of "disability" to exclude many individuals that Congress intended to protect from discrimination.
