# Tennessee v. Lane

> Supreme Court of the United States · May 17, 2004 · 541 U.S. 509

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9434607

## Case

- **Full name:** TENNESSEE v. LANE Et Al.
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** May 17, 2004
- **Citations:** 541 U.S. 509; 2004 D.A.R. 5854; 124 S. Ct. 1978; 158 L. Ed. 2d 820; 2004 U.S. LEXIS 3386
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Thomas
- **Judges:** Stevens, Rehnquist, Scalia, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, Kennedy, Thomas
- **Cited by:** 996 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- **Yellow flag:** Questioned by Pace v. Bogalusa City School Board, 403 F.3d 272 (2005).
- Negative treatments: 1
- Distinguished by: 0
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9434607

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- concluding that Congress had sufficient evidence of widespread constitutional violations to enact remedial legislation where, among other evidence “[a] report before Congress showed that some 76% of public services and programs housed in state-owned buildings were inaccessible…
- holding that in providing prophylactic relief in the context of a "fundamental right of access to [state] courts," Title II of the ADA "constitutes a valid exercise of Congress's § 5 authority to enforce the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment" and abrogates the states' Ele…
- explaining that the situ- ation before the Court involved “basic rights, including the right of access to the courts . . . , that call for a standard of judicial review at least as searching, and in some cases more searching, than the standard that applies to sex- based classi…
- stating that the federal Due Process and Confrontation Clauses “as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment” guarantee criminal defendants be present at all stages of the trial where their absence might frustrate the fairness of the proceedings
- explaining that Title II does not require a public entity to employ any and all means to make services accessible to persons with disabilities, and it does not require states to compromise their essential eligibility criteria for public programs

## Opinion text

Justice Thomas,
dissenting.
I join The Chief Justice’s dissent. I agree that Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 cannot be a *566 congruent and proportional remedy to the States’ alleged practice of denying disabled persons access to the courts. Not only did Congress fail to identify any evidence of such a practice when it enacted the ADA, ante, at 541-548, Title II regulates far more than the provision of access to the courts, ante, at 548-554. Because I joined the dissent in Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs, 538 U. S. 721 (2003), and continue to believe that Hibbs was wrongly decided, I write separately only to disavow any reliance on Hibbs in reaching this conclusion.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9434607. Public record. Not legal advice.