Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller

Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C., 596 U.S. 212 (2022), is the case that decides what your lawsuit is worth — and for most students, the answer is not what they were expecting. It is a 2022 decision about a deaf woman and a physical therapy clinic, and it reshaped every disability and civil rights case brought against a school that takes federal money.

What happened

Jane Cummings, who is deaf and legally blind, asked a physical therapy provider for an ASL interpreter. It refused and told her to bring her own, or to use written notes and lip reading. She went elsewhere and sued under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Affordable Care Act.

She had not lost money. What she had suffered was humiliation, frustration, and emotional distress — which is exactly what most people in her position suffer, and exactly what she asked to be compensated for.

The holding

Emotional distress damages are not available under the anti-discrimination statutes Congress passed under its spending power. That includes Section 504, Title VI, Title IX, and the ACA’s anti-discrimination provision.

The reasoning runs through contract law. Statutes enacted under the Spending Clause work like a deal: the federal government offers money, and the recipient — here, a school — agrees to conditions. A recipient can only be held to remedies it would have understood it was accepting when it took the funds. Because emotional distress damages are not normally available for breach of contract, the Court held that no funding recipient would have understood itself to be signing up for them.

The decision extended Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U.S. 181 (2002), which had already used the same contract analogy to hold that punitive damages are unavailable under Section 504 and the ADA.

What this does to a student case

Put the two together and the money side of a student civil rights case is narrower than almost every client assumes.

Gone: compensation for the humiliation of a public accusation, the anxiety of a year in limbo, the depression that followed the dismissal, the damage to your sense of yourself. That is usually the largest part of what was actually done to a student, and it is not recoverable under these statutes.

Gone: punitive damages, however badly the school behaved.

What survives: economic loss you can prove — tuition paid for a year that was destroyed, lost earnings from a delayed or foreclosed career, costs of transferring or repeating — plus every form of equitable relief, plus attorney’s fees where a statute provides them.

What Cummings did not touch, and why that is the point

This is the half of the case that gets lost, and it is the half that matters most to students.

Cummings is a damages decision. It says nothing about injunctions. Courts applying it have been explicit that equitable relief survives untouched: an order expunging the record, correcting the transcript, reinstating the student, conferring the degree, requiring the accommodation, or requiring the school to redo a hearing properly. None of that is a damages remedy, and none of it is affected.

So the practical effect of Cummings is not that student cases became worthless. It is that the value of a student case moved out of the damages column and into the order. That is an uncomfortable adjustment for anyone who came in wanting to be paid for what was done to them. It is not, in the end, a bad place to be: the record, the transcript, the seat, and what the school tells a licensing board are what most students actually needed.

The routes around it, and their limits

Where emotional distress is genuinely the core of the harm, the question becomes whether a different claim reaches it.

Section 1983, at a public school. Constitutional claims are not Spending Clause claims, and Cummings does not govern them. Compensatory damages for emotional harm are available on a due process or equal protection theory. Against a state university itself the Eleventh Amendment is usually in the way, so the claim runs against officials, and qualified immunity is waiting.

State law. Contract claims against the school, and state disability or civil rights statutes, are not limited by Cummings. What they offer varies enormously from one state to the next, and contract damages have their own limits on emotional harm.

Settlement. Nothing stops a school from paying to resolve a case. Cummings limits what a court can award after trial; it does not limit what a defendant will agree to when it wants the matter closed. Realistic expectations about the ceiling are what make a negotiation productive rather than theatrical.

Why you should know this before you hire anyone

Any lawyer who quotes you a damages figure for emotional harm in a Section 504 or Title IX case against a school has either not read Cummings or is not telling you the truth. Four years on, that conversation still happens.

The honest version is this: these cases are usually worth pursuing for what the order can do to your record and your future, sometimes for provable economic loss, and occasionally for fees. Decide whether that is worth it to you at the beginning, with real numbers, rather than eighteen months in.

This practice is student-side only

A Students’ Lawyer represents students and families. It does not advise, defend, or consult for colleges, universities, testing agencies, or licensing boards. Schools read Cummings as a reason to value these cases at close to nothing. Knowing precisely what it left standing is how that assumption gets corrected.