# Sutton v. United Air Lines, Inc. > Supreme Court of the United States · June 22, 1999 · 527 U.S. 471 URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433850 ## Case - **Full name:** SUTTON Et Al. v. UNITED AIR LINES, INC. - **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States - **Decided:** June 22, 1999 - **Citations:** 527 U.S. 471; 119 S. Ct. 2139; 144 L. Ed. 2d 450; 1999 U.S. LEXIS 4371 - **Precedential status:** Published - **Opinion:** Concurrence by Ginsburg - **Judges:** O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer - **Cited by:** 1,788 later opinions in the Frix Law Library ## Citator (automated) - **Yellow flag:** Reported superseded by statute, as recognized in Mercado v. Government of PR — not on the Supreme Court's list. - Negative treatments: 2 - Distinguished by: 3 - Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433850 ## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction) - holding the City was not entitled to simply rely on the physician’s that mitigating or corrective measures must be taken into recommendation2as the basis for withdrawing its employment account in judging whether an individual possesses a offer to Holiday. See, e.g., EEOC v. Te… - holding that a complaint alleging that two job applicants were "regarded as” disabled by an employer was properly dismissed because the job applicants had not alleged and could not demonstrate that the employer's job requirements reflected a belief that the applicants were sub… - holding that the phrase “substantially limits” is “properly read as requiring that a person be presently-not potentially or hypothetically-substantially limited in order to demonstrate a disability. A ‘disability’ exists only where an impairment ‘substantially limits’ a major … - reasoning that an “approach [that] would often require courts and employers to speculate about a person’s condition and would, in many cases, force them to make a disability determination based on general information about how an uncorrected impairment usually affects individu… - stating that "there may be some conceptual difficulty in defining 'major life activities' to include work, for it seems ‘to argue in a circle to say that one is excluded, for instance, by reason of [an impairment, from working with others] ... then that exclusion constitutes a… ## Opinion text Justice Ginsburg, concurring. I agree that 42 U. S. C. § 12102 (2)(A) does not reach the legions of people with correctable disabilities. The strongest clues to Congress’ perception of the domain of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), as I see it, are legislative findings that “some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities,” § 12101(a)(1), and that “individuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority,” persons “subjected to a history of purposeful unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of political powerlessness in our society,” § 12101(a)(7). These declarations are inconsistent with the enormously embracing definition of disability petitioners urge. As the Court demonstrates, see ante, at 483-487, the inclusion of correctable disabilities within the ADA’s domain would extend the Act’s coverage to far more than 43 million people. And persons whose uncorrected eyesight is poor, or who rely on daily medication for their well-being, can be found in every social and economic class; they do not cluster among the politically powerless, nor do they coalesce as historical victims of discrimination. In short, in no sensible way can one rank the large numbers of diverse individuals with corrected disabilities as a “discrete and insular minority.” I do not mean to suggest that any of the constitutional presumptions or doctrines that may apply to “discrete and insular” minorities in other contexts are relevant here; there is no con *495 stitutional dimension to this case. Congress’ use of the phrase, however, is a telling indication of its intent to restrict the ADA’s coverage to a confined, and historically disadvantaged, class. --- Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433850. Public record. Not legal advice.