The Underwhelming Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act

The 2008 amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) were intended to expand the protection against discrimination for persons with disabilities beyond the Supreme Court\u27s narrow interpretation of who is disabled. While the amendments and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) regulations address some of the Court\u27s narrow interpretations of the ADA, lower courts may still be able to limit coverage of persons with disabilities who are still able to perform tasks that involve a major life activity, which is limited by their impairment, and persons who have impairments with temporary or intermittent effects. Claimants may also be excluded if they fail to make a concrete comparison of their impairment to others in the general population and to other plaintiffs with similar impairments who have come before them, or if they fail to present professional evidence supporting the extent of their limitations. More importantly, courts may continue to make the largely factual determinations regarding whether the claimant is substantially limited in a major life activity, rather than allowing a jury to decide whether the claimant is covered by the ADA

The Underwhelming Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act

The 2008 amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) were intended to expand the protection against discrimination for persons with disabilities beyond the Supreme Court\u27s narrow interpretation of who is disabled. While the amendments and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) regulations address some of the Court\u27s narrow interpretations of the ADA, lower courts may still be able to limit coverage of persons with disabilities who are still able to perform tasks that involve a major life activity, which is limited by their impairment, and persons who have impairments with temporary or intermittent effects. Claimants may also be excluded if they fail to make a concrete comparison of their impairment to others in the general population and to other plaintiffs with similar impairments who have come before them, or if they fail to present professional evidence supporting the extent of their limitations. More importantly, courts may continue to make the largely factual determinations regarding whether the claimant is substantially limited in a major life activity, rather than allowing a jury to decide whether the claimant is covered by the ADA

Leave as an Accommodation: When is Enough, Enough?

The right to reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act includes leave that will enable an employee with a disability to return to work rather than being discharged. This right may seem unreasonable for an employer needing employees to be at work to be productive, raising the question of when leave as an accommodation becomes unreasonable or imposes an undue hardship on an employer. In the absence of specific guidance from the Supreme Court, the circuit courts apply a variety of approaches, ranging from individualized analysis to determinations that any leave exceeding some number of weeks is unreasonable. In this paper, three hundred and fifty-three decisions addressing this question have been analyzed to determine which factors are determinative of reasonableness, including factors identified in the various approaches of the circuit courts as well as those which economists would use to determine the value of an employee and the cost of replacing that employee

A NuSTAR Survey of Nearby Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies

We present a Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Chandra, and XMM-Newton survey of nine of the nearest ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs). The unprecedented sensitivity of NuSTAR at energies above 10 keV enables spectral modeling with far better precision than was previously possible. Six of the nine sources observed were detected sufficiently well by NuSTAR to model in detail their broadband X-ray spectra, and recover the levels of obscuration and intrinsic X-ray luminosities. Only one source (IRAS 13120–5453) has a spectrum consistent with a Compton-thick active galactic nucleus (AGN), but we cannot rule out that a second source (Arp 220) harbors an extremely highly obscured AGN as well. Variability in column density (reduction by a factor of a few compared to older observations) is seen in IRAS 05189–2524 and Mrk 273, altering the classification of these borderline sources from Compton-thick to Compton-thin. The ULIRGs in our sample have surprisingly low observed fluxes in high-energy (>10 keV) X-rays, especially compared to their bolometric luminosities. They have lower ratios of unabsorbed 2–10 keV to bolometric luminosity, and unabsorbed 2–10 keV to mid-IR [O iv] line luminosity than do Seyfert 1 galaxies. We identify IRAS 08572+3915 as another candidate intrinsically X-ray weak source, similar to Mrk 231. We speculate that the X-ray weakness of IRAS 08572+3915 is related to its powerful outflow observed at other wavelengths