District Court in Minnesota Makes the Case for Why Internet Sites are Places of Public Accommodations

Today’s blog entry comes from Minnesota. It was actually sent to me by the plaintiff’s attorney on the case. It has also been blogged on already by others, but I wanted to offer my own perspective. The case of the day is Frost v. Lion Brand Yarn Company, here, decided by the United States District Court of Minnesota on February 6, 2025. It makes the case for why an Internet site doing activities within one of the categories of 42 U.S.C. 12181(7) is a place of public accommodation. The facts are pretty typical. A person who uses a screen reader could not access the company’s website and sues for disability discrimination. Importantly, the plaintiff actually enjoys the activities related to what the website offers, which is material for knitting, as she knits frequently herself. Lion Brand filed a motion to dismiss, which for the reasons discussed below the court denied. As usual, the blog entry is divided into categories and they are court’s reasoning as to why Lion Brand’s Internet site is a place of public accommodation and thoughts/takeaways. The reader will probably want to read the whole thing.

I

Court’s Reasoning As to Why Lion Brand’s Internet Site Is a Place of Public Accommodation

1. Congress enacted the ADA in 1992 to remedy widespread discrimination against persons with disabilities.
2. The element of a disability discrimination claim under Title III of the ADA are: 1) the plaintiff is a person with a disability; 2) the defendant owns, leases or operates a place of public accommodation; 3) the defendant engaged in conduct adverse to the plaintiff because of the plaintiff’s disability; and 4) the defendant failed or refused to provide the plaintiff a reasonable accommodation for the plaintiff’s disability.
3. Title III of the ADA contains a broad definition of the term “public accommodation.”
4. The 12 extensive categories of facilities in 42 U.S.C. §12181(7) are to be construed liberally in order to ensure people with disabilities equal access to the wide variety of establishments available to the nondisabled.
5. The Eighth Circuit has been silent on whether an Internet site is a place of public accommodation.
6. There is a split in the circuits on the question of whether an Internet site is subject to Title III of the ADA. The Third Circuit, Sixth Circuit, and Ninth Circuit have all held that Title III of the ADA unambiguously applies only to physical structures.
7. The 11^th Circuit has not taken a clear position on the issue.
8. The First Circuit and the Seventh Circuit have held that Title III’s definition of public accommodation includes areas that are not physical structures.
9. Many district courts have been asked to decide whether websites are themselves places of public accommodations under the ADA and have been deciding in the affirmative.
10. The decisions from the Third Circuit, Sixth Circuit and Ninth Circuit are not binding on a District Court in Minnesota. Also, those decisions did not touch on the issue of whether businesses are free to operate websites denying disabled Internet users equal access to the goods and services they offer because of the user’s disability. Instead, those cases dealt with the issue of whether Title III’s prohibition on discrimination in places of public accommodation requires a long-term disability insurer to treat mental and physical disability the same in terms of the insurance policy itself. Concluding that Title III of the ADA does not apply to the content of insurance policy did not require the sweeping conclusion that only physical structures are places of public accommodations. In other words, those three cases would have come out the same regardless of whether a Title III place of public accommodation is or is not limited to places that have a physical structure.
11. The court respectfully disagrees with an interpretation from those cases that a physical structure is necessary for the applicability of Title III of the ADA. The canons of construction used by those courts play too great a role in their analysis as canons of construction need not be conclusive and are often encountered by some other canon pointing in a different direction. Application of the Canon of construction used by those courts results in too narrow a reading of the term “public accommodation,” because the physical structures only construction ignores the maxim that a remedial statute needs to be read broadly.
12. A physical structures only construction, also runs counter to the ADA’s intent, which Congress enacted to eliminate discrimination against persons with disabilities, and to integrate them into the economic and social mainstream of American life through a comprehensive law targeting widespread discrimination.
13. The relevant statutory language does not reflect congressional intent to limit “places of public accommodation,” to locations with a physical structure thereby excluding places like websites from Title III’s coverage.
14. The operative language of Title III, 42 U.S.C. §12182(a), prohibits discrimination that prevents a person with a disability from the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facility, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation (emphasis in opinion).
15. Neither 42 U.S.C. §12182(a) nor the 12 broad categories included in the definition of public accommodation in §12181(7), expressly put limits on the places where disability discrimination is prohibited to those that are “physical structures.” As the First Circuit recognized, examples of “service establishments” in §12181(7)(F), often conduct their business in ways that do not require their customers to enter an office in order to obtain their services.
16. Reference to dictionary definitions of the term “place,” does not resolve the question. Although contemporary dictionary definitions can be useful in understanding the meaning of an undefined term in the statute, the definition of words in isolation is not necessarily controlling in statutory construction.
17. The definitions of ”place,” found in dictionaries around the time of the ADA’s passage referred to buildings and other physical locations, however they did not suggest that all places are necessarily physical structures. In fact, during the years just before the passage of the ADA, the American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, said that a “place,” meant “a portion of space”; “an area with definite or indefinite boundaries,” “an area occupied by or set aside for a specific person or persons,” and a “business establishment or office.” Other dictionaries at the time compiled similar ranges of definitions of which an office or building was but one example. For example, Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, the New Lexicon, defined a place as including: “a particular part of space,” “position in space, or in some hierarchy, scale, orderly arrangement,” “a building or area appointed for a specified purpose.” The Random House dictionary of the English language at the time contained a similar definition. None of those dictionary definitions, nor the list of examples within the statutory definition of “public accommodation,” resolve conclusively the question of whether a “place of public accommodation,” is limited to physical structures.
18. A website is not inconsistent with the noun “place.” A website is a location in the space known as the Internet, and the word “place,” can be defined as a particular position or point.
19. The Supreme Court has characterized cyberspace as the most important place for the exchange of views.
20. A reading of “place,” not being confined to physical structures is consistent with Congress’s decision to prevent discrimination in “any (emphasis in opinion), place of public accommodation.”
21. Preventing discrimination in any (emphasis in opinion), does not reflect an unstated intent to allow businesses to deprive individuals with disabilities equal access to the goods and services whenever those businesses lack a brick-and-mortar store.
22. The court also finds that title III’s legislative history supports the conclusion that a standalone website is a place of public accommodation. This is true even though the ADA was passed prior to the advent of the Internet. In fact, legislative history reflects that Congress intended the ADA to adapt to changes in technology, and that the specific examples in §12181(7) were intended only to require a plaintiff to show that the defendant’s place of public accommodation falls within a general category listed under the ADA.
23. In the standalone websites of today, customers engage in an enormous amount of interstate commerce, that reasonably fall into one or more of the categories of public accommodation reflected in the statutory definition. This is especially true when one reads those categories in the context of the injustice Title III of the ADA was meant to remedy.
24. A website operating a store like Lion Brand’s is not meaningfully different from a physical shopping center, and is functionally a sales or rental establishment when it comes to the need for persons with disabilities to have access. A brick and mortar sales establishment can discriminatorily prevent disabled person from gaining meaningful access to its goods and services by failing to install ramps for wheelchair access or omitting braille signage for persons who are blind or visually impaired to find public restrooms. In similar ways, online sales establishments failing to maintain websites that can be navigated by those who are blind or visually impaired prohibits these customers from gaining equal access to the goods and services because they cannot navigate those websites even when using screen reader technology.
25. Citing to a Seventh Circuit case, the court noted that the Seventh Circuit said that the site of the sale is irrelevant to Congress’s goal of granting the disabled equal access to seller of goods and services. Instead, what matters is that the good or service be offered to the public.
26. Citing to a District Court case from Virginia, the court noted in a footnote of a case that mentioned people shop in virtual marketplaces for everything from luxury to necessities, and we now rely even more on online shopping as a result of the recent pandemic.
27. The court is also not convinced that the absence of any amendment of the ADA since the advent of web-based commerce, indicates congressional intent to exclude websites from Title III’s coverage. Construing a statute by reference to post enactment legislative silence is a fraught enterprise rarely yielding clear answers.
28. In the years since the Internet has become a place where customers engage in significant commerce, the fact that the ADA has not been amended to expressly include websites in the list of place of the public accommodation could just as easily reflect Congress’s understanding that no amendment was necessary.
29. For all these reasons, the court holds that a website is a place of public accommodation for purposes of Title III of the ADA.

II

Thoughts/Takeaways

1. The Circuits are definitely split on the issue of whether an Internet site is a place of public accommodation. The Supreme Court will ultimately have to step in.
2. As mentioned in this blog entry, the Supreme Court has already given a strong indication of how it will decide whether Internet sites are a place of public accommodation. As mentioned in that blog entry, which involved the question of whether South Dakota had the right to tax an entity doing a tremendous amount of business in South Dakota but did not have a physical presence there, the Supreme Court came up with 23 different statements about why a “place,” is not limited to physical structures. Accordingly, I would not bet against the Supreme Court, even with this current configuration, holding that Internet sites are places of public accommodations if engaged in one of the 12 categories listed in 42 U.S.C. §12181(7). I do know that South Dakota v. Wayfair was cited by the plaintiff’s attorney in their motions, but for whatever reason the court’s opinion didn’t mention it.
3. For anyone arguing that the Internet is a place of public accommodation, this case gives the arguments in favor of that as well as the arguments to be made against the other side.
4. The case involved a motion to dismiss, so the next stage will be the motion for summary judgment after discovery occurs.
5. Lion Brand will probably spend a lot more money through the trial and possibly appellate process, considering what attorneys cost nowadays, than it would take to fix their website, but that is for Lion Brand to decide.
6. The term “visually impaired,” is perfectly okay to use in the vision loss community, though some may prefer blind. Do not use the term “hearing impaired,” with respect to the hearing loss community as that term drives us crazy. In the hearing loss community, the terms are Deaf, deaf, and hard of hearing.
7. There was not an issue with standing in this case because the plaintiff was a knitter and wanted to buy supplies on the website related to knitting.
8. In designing accessible websites, the go to is WCAG 2.0, 2.1 level AA.
9. In designing accessible websites, don’t forget about voice dictation users. What works for screen reader users does not always work for voice dictation users and vice a versa, though that is usually the case.