What Acheson Hotels v. Laufer Did (and Didn’t) Decide About ADA Website Tester Standing

Search “ADA tester standing Supreme Court” and you’ll find a lot of confident-sounding summaries treating Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer as the case that resolved whether a “tester” — someone who visits a website with no intention of buying anything, solely to check it for accessibility barriers and then sue — has legal standing to bring an ADA claim. It’s the right case. It’s the wrong takeaway. The Supreme Court decided Laufer unanimously in December 2023 and never reached that question at all.

Quick answer: In Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer, 601 U.S. 1 (2023), the Supreme Court dismissed the case as moot, 9-0, without ruling on whether ADA “tester” plaintiffs have Article III standing to sue over a website that doesn’t apply to them personally. The underlying claim was itself a website-accessibility claim — Deborah Laufer alleged a hotel’s online reservation system failed to describe accessible features as required by a DOJ regulation. The Court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Barrett, dismissed on narrow facts specific to Laufer’s own litigation history and explicitly said it “might exercise [its] discretion differently in a future case.” Justice Thomas’s and Justice Jackson’s separate opinions each addressed the standing question directly — in opposite directions — but neither commands a majority. The circuit split that existed before the ruling remains undisturbed, and courts are still actively litigating tester standing in website-accessibility cases today.

This article is general accessibility and legal-landscape information, not legal advice. It explains what one specific Supreme Court decision did and didn’t resolve — it doesn’t tell you whether a tester plaintiff would have standing to sue your specific site. Talk to an attorney for that.

Who counts as an ADA “tester,” and why it’s a separate question from the merits

Most ADA website litigation coverage focuses on the merits question: is this website actually inaccessible, and does the ADA even apply to it? Standing is a different, earlier question: does this plaintiff have the kind of injury the Constitution requires before a federal court can hear the case at all. Article III limits federal courts to deciding actual “cases and controversies,” which the Supreme Court has long read to require a concrete, particularized injury — not a plaintiff suing on principle.

A “tester” plaintiff complicates that question by design. Testers in disability-rights litigation visit a business — or its website — with no intention of using it, specifically to check for violations and then file suit. The practice has deep roots in fair-housing law: in Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982), the Supreme Court held that a Fair Housing Act tester who received false information about a rental’s availability suffered a real “informational injury” sufficient for standing, even with no intent to rent. Whether that same logic extends to the ADA — a different statute, with different language — is exactly what Laufer was supposed to settle.

The case: a hotel’s reservation website, not a hotel room

Deborah Laufer, who has several disabilities including limited mobility and vision, describes herself as an ADA tester. Since 2018 she filed several hundred lawsuits against hotels, each alleging the same thing: their online reservation systems didn’t describe accessible features in enough detail for a disabled traveler to judge whether the hotel would work for them. That requirement comes from an actual DOJ regulation, 28 C.F.R. § 36.302(e)(1)(ii) — the Reservation Rule — which requires places of lodging to “identify and describe accessible features in the hotels and guest rooms offered through its reservations service in enough detail to reasonably permit individuals with disabilities to assess independently whether a given hotel or guest room meets his or her accessibility needs.” This is a website-content claim, not a physical-barrier claim, which is why the case matters to e-commerce sellers even though it’s about hotels.

Laufer sued Acheson Hotels over the website for a Maine inn she had no plans to visit. The District of Maine dismissed for lack of standing. The First Circuit reversed, relying on Havens’ tester-standing logic and finding Laufer suffered a real “informational injury” by being denied the accessibility information the regulation entitled her to. That reversal deepened an existing split: as Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III litigation blog — the same source cited in Quietramp’s coverage of serial-plaintiff litigation data — summarized at the time, the First, Fourth, and Eleventh Circuits had found tester standing proper, while the Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits had rejected it, with the Ninth Circuit’s own position under separate reconsideration. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on March 27, 2023, specifically to resolve that split.

What actually happened before the ruling

Before the Court could hear the case on the merits, the litigation took an unusual turn. A federal court had sanctioned one of Laufer’s attorneys for misconduct in unrelated matters. In response, Laufer voluntarily dismissed all of her then-pending ADA cases, including related claims against Acheson, and represented to the Court that she would not file similar suits going forward. Acheson argued this made the dispute between the two parties moot — no actual, ongoing controversy left for the Court to decide — even though the broader standing question was still live in every other pending tester case nationwide.

What the Supreme Court actually held

On December 5, 2023, the Court ruled 9-0 that Laufer’s case against Acheson was moot, and dismissed it on that basis — not on the standing question it had granted certiorari to answer. Justice Barrett’s majority opinion (joined in full by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) stated the Court “might exercise [its] discretion differently in a future case,” per Seyfarth Shaw’s contemporaneous summary — language that only makes sense if the standing question was left open, not resolved. The Court vacated the First Circuit’s judgment as part of dismissing the case, the ordinary practice when a case becomes moot on appeal.

Justices Thomas and Jackson each concurred only in the judgment — agreeing the case should be dismissed, for different reasons than the majority, and each addressed the standing question the majority avoided. Thomas argued the Court should have reached the merits and found Laufer lacked standing from the start: a plaintiff who never intended to visit a hotel suffers no concrete injury from inaccurate information about it, in his view, regardless of Havens. Jackson agreed the case was moot but disagreed with vacating the First Circuit’s pro-tester ruling underneath that dismissal, arguing it should have been left in place instead.

Why the standing question is still being litigated

Because the Court resolved Laufer on mootness, the circuit split it granted certiorari to settle is exactly where it was before the case began. No circuit was required to change its approach, and lower courts have kept litigating tester standing on their own, case by case.

That’s visible in real rulings decided well after Laufer. In 2025, two federal district courts in New York reached different outcomes on tester standing in website-accessibility cases within months of each other. In Fernandez v. Buffalo Jackson Trading Co., the Southern District of New York didn’t dismiss outright — it ordered jurisdictional discovery after the plaintiff’s complaint raised red flags (claims of purchasing dozens of products a week across many sites), with the court noting, per Seyfarth Shaw’s reporting, that such litigants “may have standing” but that the specific factual claims needed scrutiny. In Black v. 3 Times 90, Inc., the Eastern District of New York dismissed a similar claim outright, finding no “plausible inference that the plaintiff intended to return to the website.” Seyfarth Shaw’s coverage frames the shift plainly: New York federal courts are “demanding more from serial plaintiffs to establish standing to sue” than a few years ago — a trend that has reportedly pushed a meaningful share of this litigation into state courts instead, where standing rules can differ.

FAQ

Did the Supreme Court rule that ADA testers can’t sue? No. It didn’t rule on tester standing at all. It dismissed one specific case as moot, on facts specific to that plaintiff’s litigation history, and explicitly reserved the standing question for a future case.

Is the First Circuit’s pro-tester ruling in Laufer still good law? No — the Supreme Court vacated it as part of dismissing the case as moot, over Justice Jackson’s objection. It no longer carries binding weight, but the reasoning in it hasn’t been rejected on the merits either; it’s simply off the books.

So is tester standing settled in my circuit? Not by this case. The pre-Laufer split (favorable to testers in the First, Fourth, and Eleventh Circuits; unfavorable in the Second, Fifth, and Tenth) was never disturbed, and courts — as the 2025 New York rulings show — are increasingly scrutinizing a plaintiff’s specific facts rather than treating “I’m a tester” as automatically sufficient.

Does any of this mean my site is safe from a tester lawsuit? No. Whether a specific plaintiff has standing to sue over a specific website depends on jurisdiction and facts — not something a general article about one Supreme Court case can answer for your business.

The legal question and the technical one are separate

Whatever a court eventually decides about who can sue, it has no bearing on whether a website actually meets WCAG 2.1 AA for a disabled visitor trying to use it — tester or not. Quietramp’s $890 one-time audit is a human-verified pass against that standard, delivered as a prioritized, developer-actionable PDF report, not a legal opinion. See a real sample report or check pricing — $890 one-time, $99/month for ongoing re-checks as a site changes.

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This is provided for general educational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Case law and procedural history described here reflect the sources cited as of this article’s publish date and may change; only a qualified attorney looking at your specific facts can assess your actual legal exposure under the ADA or any other law.

This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a person for accuracy before publication.