{"id":10318,"date":"2026-04-17T01:27:41","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T01:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-holds-that-emotional-distress-damages-are-unavailable-under-the-rehabilitation-act-of-1973-and-the-affordable-care-act\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T01:27:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T01:27:41","slug":"supreme-court-holds-that-emotional-distress-damages-are-unavailable-under-the-rehabilitation-act-of-1973-and-the-affordable-care-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-holds-that-emotional-distress-damages-are-unavailable-under-the-rehabilitation-act-of-1973-and-the-affordable-care-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Holds that Emotional Distress Damages Are Unavailable Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Affordable Care Act"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On April 28, 2022, in Cummings<\/em> v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C.<\/em>, 596 U.S. __(2022), the Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that emotional distress damages are not recoverable under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Affordable Care Act (the \u201cACA\u201d). We previously discussed oral argument in this case here.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h3>\n

Petitioner Jane Cummings, who is deaf and legally blind, sought physical therapy services from Respondent Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C. (\u201cPremier\u201d) in 2016 and 2017. After Premier refused to provide Cummings with an ASL interpreter, Cummings received services elsewhere and filed suit against Premier, alleging that Premier discriminated against her on the basis of disability in violation of the Rehabilitation Act and the ACA. Cummings sought, among other remedies, emotional distress damages. The district court dismissed Cummings\u2019 complaint, concluding that the only compensable injury she suffered was emotional distress, and that neither the Rehabilitation Act nor the ACA authorize awards of emotional distress damages. The Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal of Cummings\u2019 complaint.<\/p>\n

The Decision<\/h3>\n

In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court explained that statutes that impose liability on private entities based on their receipt of federal funding\u2014including the Rehabilitation Act and the ACA, which prohibit recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of disability\u2014should be viewed through the lens of contract law. In so reasoning, the Court concluded that remedies for violations of those statutes are limited to those for which the recipient would have had clear notice in accepting the funds. Utilizing that framework, the Court observed that \u201c[i]t is hornbook law that \u2018emotional distress is generally not compensable in contract[.]\u2019\u201d Because emotional distress damages are not generally available in contract law and neither the Rehabilitation Act nor the ACA expressly provide for such damages, the Court held that \u201cwe therefore cannot treat federal funding recipients as having consented to be subject to damages for emotional distress.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Concurrence<\/h3>\n

In an opinion joined by Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh rejected the contract law analogy as \u201can imperfect way to determine the remedies for this implied cause of action\u201d and argued, instead, that \u201cthe inquiry [should] focus on a background interpretive principle rooted in the Constitution\u2019s separation of powers.\u201d Because \u201cCongress, not this Court, creates new causes of action,\u201d the concurrence concluded that emotional distress damages were unavailable.<\/p>\n

The Dissent<\/h3>\n

In dissent, Justice Breyer agreed with the Court\u2019s conclusion that principles of contract law should guide the Court\u2019s inquiry, but concluded that \u201c[e]motional distress damages were traditionally available when \u2018the contract or the breach\u2019 was \u2018of such a kind that serious emotional disturbance was a particularly likely result.\u2019\u201d The dissent reasoned that, because intentional invidious discrimination \u201cis particularly likely to cause serious emotional disturbance,\u201d victims of such discrimination should be able to recover emotional distress damages. The dissent also argued that Congress has provided for emotional distress damages under other antidiscrimination laws, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that the Court\u2019s decision therefore creates an \u201cinequity\u201d because emotional distress damages are available for certain types of discrimination claims but not others.<\/p>\n

While the Court\u2019s decision limits damages under the Rehabilitation Act and the ACA, and likely Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting race and national original discrimination) and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (prohibiting sex discrimination), emotional distress damages remain available under certain antidiscrimination statutes where Congress expressly provided for such damages, such as 42 U.S.C. \u00a7\u00a01983 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 28, 2022, in Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C., 596 U.S. __(2022), the Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that emotional distress damages are not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[911,7749,4433,143,532,5550,5549,1876,7748,533,7747],"class_list":["post-10318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-act","tag-affordable","tag-care","tag-court","tag-damages","tag-distress","tag-emotional","tag-holds","tag-rehabilitation","tag-supreme","tag-unavailable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}