A Good Perspective on the NYT on Serial Litigation

See this interesting blog post.  An excerpt:

My caregiving job emphasized community integration, so I took people on lots of walks and transit outings in different neighborhoods in the Portland area. When that’s the crux of your work, you learn pretty quickly which sidewalks are passable and which are just slightly overgrown with hedges; you learn which sidewalks have appropriate curb cuts and which sections of the neighborhood are better traversed right on the street. You learn whose wheelchair will fit on the bus and whose won’t. 

And you learn which businesses are accessible and which are not. Obviously, you avoid the latter. Planning dates — and these days, planning my own forays into the community — requires a similar, but different, set of calculations about what’s accessible and what isn’t. 

What I’m getting at is that if you write that no one is being hurt by a lack of accessibility, you’re right, but only because the ambulance chaser analogy and framing is fundamentally flawed. That people with disabilities are in many cases more likely to accept segregation than to seek out — and attempt to access — businesses they know aren’t going to be accessible for them doesn’t surprise me. Nor does it surprise me that some plaintiffs have shown little interest in accessing businesses named in the claims their names were attached to. Most of us — able-bodied or not — only visit places we can get to, and where we’ll feel comfortable, and avoid places that don’t fit that category for so long they just drop off our internal map and out of our routine.