Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer
The Supreme Court dismissed a closely watched disability-rights case as moot — without answering the legal question it had agreed to resolve — after the plaintiff voluntarily dropped all her pending lawsuits while the case was before the Court.
The unresolved question of whether so-called 'tester' plaintiffs can sue hotels for website accessibility failures without ever planning to stay there remains alive, and the disagreement among federal appeals courts over that question continues.
How it got here: A Maine federal district court dismissed Laufer's suit for lack of standing; the First Circuit reversed; Acheson Hotels petitioned for certiorari; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, then Laufer voluntarily dismissed all her suits before a decision was issued.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Deborah Laufer, a disabled woman in Florida, filed more than 600 lawsuits against hotels whose websites did not include the disability-accessibility information required by federal rules. She targeted hotels she had no plans to visit, acting as a self-described "tester" of legal compliance. Acheson Hotels, owner of a Maine bed-and-breakfast, fought back rather than settle, arguing Laufer had suffered no real personal harm and therefore had no right to sue. While the case was pending at the Supreme Court, a federal court sanctioned Laufer's attorney for fraud in related cases, and Laufer then voluntarily dropped all her pending lawsuits.
The question before the Court
After a disabled woman who sued hundreds of hotels for disability-access failures on their websites voluntarily dropped her lawsuits, should the Supreme Court have still answered whether she had the right to sue in the first place?
The Court's answer
The Court declined to answer the question it had agreed to resolve. It dismissed the case as moot — meaning the dispute had ended — because Laufer voluntarily dropped all her pending lawsuits after a federal court sanctioned her attorney for fraud in related cases. When a civil case becomes moot while heading to the Supreme Court, the Court's longstanding practice (called Munsingwear vacatur, after a 1950 decision) is to wipe out the lower court's ruling and send the case back with instructions to dismiss it as moot, rather than leaving the lower court's ruling on the books.
The Court acknowledged Acheson Hotels' argument that the standing question is important and the circuit split still unresolved, but found no sufficient reason to conclude that Laufer dropped her cases deliberately to dodge an unfavorable ruling. The Court signaled it might respond differently if a similar maneuver occurred in a future case.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Hundreds of similar ADA tester lawsuits against hotels remain in legal uncertainty. Hotels in the circuits that found standing (the First, Fourth, and Eleventh) will continue facing these suits, while hotels elsewhere may not. Disability advocates lose a potential favorable ruling, and hotels lose a definitive answer either way — leaving both sides in suspense until another case reaches the Court.
What changes now
The case returns to the First Circuit, which must dismiss it as moot. The First Circuit's earlier ruling in Laufer's favor — which had split with the Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits — is wiped from the books. The fundamental legal question of whether disability "tester" plaintiffs have standing to sue hotels for ADA website violations when they have no plans to visit remains unanswered, and the circuit split persists until a new case reaches the Court.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly did not decide whether Laufer — or other "tester" plaintiffs who systematically check hotel websites for compliance without planning to stay — have the right to sue under the ADA. That question, and the six-circuit split it generated, remains fully open and will need to be resolved in a future case.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas would have reached the standing question and resolved it against Laufer. In his view, the ADA prohibits discrimination but does not create a right to receive accessibility information — unlike the Fair Housing Act, which explicitly grants a right to truthful housing information. Because Laufer had no plans to visit the hotel and asserted no violation of a right personal to her, she was acting as a private law enforcer, a role the Constitution reserves for the government, not private citizens.
Concurrence — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson agreed the case should be dismissed as moot but objected to the automatic Munsingwear vacatur of the First Circuit's judgment. She argued that mootness and vacatur are separate legal questions: mootness justifies only dismissal, while vacatur is an extraordinary equitable remedy that must be justified by a case-specific fairness analysis. Lower court rulings are presumptively valid law and should not be automatically erased simply because a case later becomes moot — doing so disrespects valid judicial work and upsets settled precedent.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Both standing — the requirement that a plaintiff have a real personal stake in the outcome — and mootness — whether a dispute is still live — flow from Article III of the Constitution, which limits federal courts to actual 'Cases or Controversies.' Because both are threshold jurisdictional questions, the Court has discretion to address either one first, with no fixed order.
- The Court chose mootness because the case was clearly over: Laufer had voluntarily dismissed all her pending ADA suits with prejudice, including her complaint against Acheson Hotels, shortly after a federal court sanctioned her attorney for fraud in related ADA tester cases.
- Acheson Hotels urged the Court to decide the standing question anyway, arguing the circuit split is unresolved, the case was fully briefed and argued, and no hotel would bother fighting another tester suit to the Supreme Court if plaintiffs can simply walk away to avoid losing. The Court found this concern understandable but not sufficient to override the mootness problem.
- The Court also rejected the inference that Laufer's dismissal was a calculated tactic. The sanctioned attorney had no involvement in the Supreme Court proceedings, so the connection between the misconduct and Laufer's decision to dismiss was indirect — making evasion less than obvious. The Court reserved the right to view a similar move more skeptically in a future case.
- Under the Court's Munsingwear practice — the standard remedy when a civil case becomes moot on the way to the Supreme Court — the lower court's judgment is vacated and the case is sent back for dismissal, so that the appeals court's ruling does not remain on the books as binding precedent even though it was never reviewed on the merits. The Court explicitly declined Justice Jackson's invitation to abandon or rethink this practice, calling it well settled.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Munsingwear, Inc. (340 U. S. 36)
The Court explicitly called its Munsingwear vacatur practice 'well settled' and refused to reconsider it.