A district judge says a nonprofit that has sued hundreds of Valley businesses cannot file its lawsuits in federal court. The order against Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities (AID) came down Thursday.
The judge says AID has no standing to pursue its claims in federal court. The group has sued more than 1,700 businesses this year for technical violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Outrage in the business community eventually led Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to intervene in the cases on behalf of the defendants. The court’s order says that AID cannot show its plaintiff suffered an injury-in-fact due to the ADA violations and kicked the cases back to state court.
The judge also sanctioned two of the lawyers for AID, saying they have “established a practice of misleading opposing counsel” and using “bait and switch maneuvers” to run up legal costs for the opposing party.
Brnovich has said he’d like to dismiss more than a thousand of the cases, but AID contends they are fighting for civil rights and the state should not defend people who have allegedly broken the law.
