The ADA at 36: Why Good Faith and Documentation Are Still Where Cases Are Won or Lost.

President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990, thirty-six years ago yesterday. Here’s the timeline that brought us from that signing to the law you manage today, and where the real risk lives now.

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TL;DR: The ADA just turned 36, but the law you actually manage today is not the one signed in 1990. A 2008 amendment reset the single question that decides most disability cases, and if your playbook still treats “disability” as the hard part, you are litigating the wrong issue.

Read the EEOC’s employer guidance on the ADA 📄

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A Rose Garden signing that took two years to reach payroll

Employers did not feel it right away. Title I, the employment piece, took effect July 26, 1992, and only for employers with 25 or more employees. Two years later, on July 26, 1994, coverage dropped to employers with 15 or more, where it sits today.

The core promise was simple. An employer cannot discriminate against a qualified individual with a disability, and must provide reasonable accommodation unless doing so imposes an undue hardship. That undue-hardship limit is the one place the statute lets cost and disruption into the analysis, and it is a defense the employer has to prove, not a box the employee has to clear.

The Supreme Court spent a decade shrinking the front door

Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Supreme Court read “disability” narrowly, and it did so in two different ways. One decision asked whether medication, hearing aids, or prosthetics already corrected the impairment. Another asked whether the limitation was severe and permanent enough to count at all. The result: cases were won and lost on whether the plaintiff was “disabled enough,” often before anyone looked at how the employer behaved.

Congress hit the reset button in 2008

Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) in 2008. President George W. Bush signed it on September 25, 2008, effective January 1, 2009. The EEOC’s implementing regulations followed on March 25, 2011.

The ADAAA did one big thing: it told courts to stop treating “disability” as the main event. The definition is construed broadly. Courts generally cannot consider mitigating measures like medication or hearing aids when deciding whether someone is disabled. And an impairment that is episodic or in remission still qualifies if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.

What the reset changed for your defense

Making coverage easy to establish moved the whole fight downstream, to whether you engaged in good faith on accommodation and whether you can prove undue hardship. The facts that decide cases now are your interactive-process emails, your documentation, and your consistency. Stop budgeting your energy for the coverage question and start spending it where cases are won.

The compliance lessons that survived 36 years

Coverage is no longer where you win, so the interactive process is. Since 2009, the “is this person disabled” question rarely ends a case. Train managers to treat almost any medical limitation as potentially covered and move straight to the accommodation conversation, because that is the record a court will actually read.

Episodic and in-remission conditions are covered even when the employee looks fine at work. Diabetes, epilepsy, PTSD, and cancer in remission all qualify when evaluated in their active state. A manager who thinks “but she seems fine most days” is applying the pre-2009 standard, and that instinct needs to be trained out.

Undue hardship is a burden you carry, not a hunch you assert. Denying an accommodation as “too expensive” or “too disruptive” only holds up if you documented the actual cost and operational impact at the time of the decision. Build the paper trail before you say no, not after you get sued.

The ADA has aged into one of the most operational statutes HR touches. Questionable accommodation decisions employers make get reconstructed later by people who weren’t there. A good faith, well-documented interactive dialogue is what keeps these decisions from turning into problems.