On January 23, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (covering the Maryland federal district) held the Amended Americans Disabilities Act can protect employees with temporary disabilities. In Summers v. Altarum Institute Corp., the Court found that an employee who has broken his leg severely was a disabled as defined by the disabilities act. The Court rejected the employer’s argument that the AADA does not apply to temporary impairments:
Although Altarum contends that Congress’s intent to withhold ADA coverage from temporarily impaired employees is “evident,” Altarum Br. 34, no such intent seems evident to us. To be sure, the amended Act does preserve, without alteration, the requirement that an impairment be “substantial” to qualify as a disability. But Congress enacted the ADAAA to correct what it perceived as the Supreme Court’s overly restrictive definition of this very term. And Congress expressly directed courts to construe the amended statute as broadly as possible. Moreover, while the ADAAA imposes a six-month requirement with respect to “regarded-as” disabilities, it imposes no such durational requirement for “actual” disabilities, thus suggesting that no such requirement was intended. See Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557, 578 (2006) (“[A] negative inference may be drawn from the exclusion of language from one statutory provision that is included in other provisions of the same statute.”). For these reasons, we must reject Altarum’s contention that the amended Act clearly evinces Congress’s intent to withhold ADA coverage for temporary impairments.The Court then went on to conclude
Alternatively, Altarum argues that, even deferring to the EEOC regulations, Summers’s impairment does not qualify as a disability. Altarum maintains that the EEOC regulations do not apply to Summers’s impairment because those regulations do not cover “temporary impairments due to injuries” even if they do cover “impairments due to permanent or long-term conditions that have only a short term impact.” Altarum Br. 37.
But, in fact, the EEOC regulations provide no basis for distinguishing between temporary impairments caused by injuries, on one hand, and temporary impairments caused by permanent conditions, on the other. The regulations state only that the “effects of an impairment lasting or expected to last fewer than six months can be substantially limiting” -- they say nothing about the cause of the impairment. 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(j)(1)(ix). Nor do the regulations suggest that an “injury” cannot be an “impairment.” Rather, the EEOC defines an impairment broadly to include “[a]ny physiological disorder or condition, cosmetic disfigurement, or anatomical loss affecting one or more body systems,” including the “musculoskeletal” system. Id. § 1630.2(h)(1). This expansive definition surely includes broken bones and torn tendons. And the EEOC elsewhere uses the terms “injury” and “impairment” interchangeably. …
In sum, nothing about the ADAAA or its regulations suggests a distinction between impairments caused by temporary injuries and impairments caused by permanent conditions. Needless to say, this is a favorable decision for employees and long overdue. The Court got it right in interpreting the provisions of the Amended American Disabilities Act.
