The U.S. Supreme Court on June 5 dismissed Labcorp’s attempt to limit participation in a class action in which blind people claimed discrimination because they could not use the company’s self-service kiosks.

The unsigned opinion of the court in Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis consists of a single sentence reversing its January decision to take up the case, a move it described as “improvidently granted.”

The Supreme Court did not provide reasons for its new decision. The court may dismiss a case as “improvidently granted” when it decides that it should not have agreed—for whatever reason—to hear the case. The court acted after it heard oral argument in the case on April 29.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed an opinion dissenting from the court’s decision to dismiss the case.

The petitioner does business with the public as Labcorp, a major provider of diagnostic services. The respondents are blind Labcorp patients, including Luke Davis and Julian Vargas.

The issue in the case is whether a federal district court may certify a class action that includes claimants who have not experienced an injury.

In a class action, one or more plaintiffs sue on behalf of a “class,” or a larger group of people who claim to have suffered the same injury because of a defendant. Federal and state court rules govern whether a class action gets certified and is allowed to proceed.

The case goes back to 2017, when Labcorp offered patients a new way to check in for appointments, according to the company’s petition filed in September 2024.

The company began offering self-service kiosks at its patient service centers, but blind individuals could not access them without help, the petition said.

In 2020, several legally blind people filed a putative—or proposed—class action lawsuit, claiming that the kiosks violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.

Labcorp claims that not all blind people in the class actually experienced injuries as a result of the company’s policies.

When it granted the petition, the Supreme Court said it would consider whether federal civil procedure rules allow a federal court to certify a class action “when some members of the proposed class lack any Article III injury.”

Article III of the U.S. Constitution governs federal courts and has been interpreted as saying that those courts may only hear cases involving actual controversies in which at least one litigant has standing to sue.

Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify their participation in a lawsuit.

The company said in the petition that “it is very hard to find blind patients actually harmed by the availability of Labcorp’s new kiosks.”

Many blind patients “either do not know these kiosks exist or, if they did, have zero interest in using them, preferring instead to use the front-desk option that has served them well for years,” it said.

The plaintiffs in the original lawsuit defined the proposed classes as “all blind patients who had been merely exposed to these allegedly unlawful kiosks—i.e., blind patients who had walked into a [patient service center] with a kiosk, regardless of whether they knew about or wanted to use it.”

The plaintiffs said this meant the classes could number as many as hundreds of thousands of people and could lead to about half a billion dollars per year in damages, the petition states.

In May 2022, a federal district court certified two classes in the lawsuit.

One class comprised patients in California seeking damages under the Unruh Act; the other class consisted of patients across the country seeking relief under the ADA and two other federal statutes—the Rehabilitation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Labcorp appealed the class certifications to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sided with the patients in a February 2024 ruling.

“Neither court … disputed that each class contained a sizable number of members who lacked Article III injuries—which makes good sense, because a person simply proximate to an allegedly unlawful kiosk has not suffered any concrete injury,” the petition said.

The Ninth Circuit’s “lax approach to certification” has been rejected by about half the federal circuit courts, it added.

Allowing uninjured persons into a class “can drive up potential liability, and thus manufacture leverage with which to extort a settlement,” the petition said.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent that he would have ruled on the merits of the case.

“I agree with Labcorp and the United States as amicus curiae: Federal courts may not certify a damages class under Rule 23 when, as here, the proposed class includes both injured and uninjured class members.”

Amicus curiae is Latin for friend of the court. An attorney representing the federal government participated in the oral argument on April 29.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 5, 2025, in The Epoch Times.