A Supreme Court case about hotel websites could blow up much of US civil rights law

Deborah Laufer has filed more than 600 different lawsuits — many of which, according to a federal court in Maryland, appear to follow the same pattern. The defendants are typically small hotels, and Laufer accuses them of failing to comply with a federal regulation requiring that they disclose on their websites whether their rooms are accessible to people with disabilities.

She also has a remarkable penchant for hiring ethically challenged lawyers. One, Tristan Gillespie, was suspended from the bar of that same Maryland court, in large part because of a scheme where he would use Laufer’s cases to squeeze money out of these hotels for work that he never did. Another, Thomas Bacon, was, according to the court, Gillespie’s “boss” and the mastermind of a “scheme that raises serious ethical concerns.” Another former lawyer, Daniel Ruggiero, was recently forbidden from practicing law for a year due to an unrelated scheme targeting homeowners with unpaid mortgage bills.

Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, one of Laufer’s many cases, is now before the Supreme Court. (The case will be argued on October 4.) It reads like the sort of horror story that business lobbyists tell lawmakers in order to sell them on tort reform. It involves a perennial plaintiff and lawyers who appear to have profited from a scheme to shake down small business owners — at least one of whom, Gillespie, is the subject of a blistering federal court opinion disciplining him for unethical behavior.