The ADA and the Unruh Civil Rights Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") and California's Unruh Civil Rights Act ("Unruh") provide incredibly strong and important protections for disabled persons in California. Together, they send a loud and clear message that disabled people should not face discrimination as they go about their daily lives.

The ADA was enacted in the early 1990s. The ADA requires public accommodations of all types to be designed and constructed in a way to provide full and complete access to disabled people. The ADA also requires businesses to ensure that their policies provide for full and complete access as well. For the most part, new construction is designed and built in a way to provide access. Where you see more problems is with older construction and illegal policies and procedures.

The authors of the ADA envisioned a distinct problem about passing a sweeping civil rights law that imposed new design and construction standards. Businesses and public facilities that existed prior to the enactment of the law would not necessarily comply. For this reason, our lawmakers developed a "readily achievable" standard for barrier removal. In short, public facilities are required to remove accessibility barriers where it is "readily achievable" to do so. In other words, an owner of a very old building is not required to demolish a structure and start over to comply with the ADA. However, that old building must be brought as close to current ADA standards as the owner's resources allow.

Moreover, public facilities are required to ensure that their policies and procedures provide for full and complete access for disabled people. Even when a business is built to exacting accessibility specifications, a bad policy or procedure can be just as large of an impediment for a disabled person.

This is why in our law practice we focus on ensuring that service animals and their users are granted all of the access that the ADA and Unruh allow. We find that many businesses and public facilities are misinformed about service animal rules and regulations and often impose illegal (and unreasonable) requirements on service animals. These are the exact type of cases that we take on here so that disabled people can enjoy all of the benefits that are provided for in the law.