Legal Update: November 2025

You can tell that someone is old when they use terms like, "pendent jurisdiction." Back in the late 1980's when I attended law school, we learned about this idea in first year Civil Procedure. The idea is simple enough: a court can hear a claim that it doesn't normally have jurisdiction over when that claim is closely tied to another claim that it does have jurisdiction over. For instance, federal courts have jurisdiction over federal claims in their district as well as state claims that involve residents from different states. Normally, they can't adjudicate state law claims from residents of the same state. If the same action violates both federal and state law, however, the court can hear the state law claim as a "pendent" claim because it's ultimately both a state and federal claim. The test, as outlined by the Supreme Court in the 1966 case of United Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715 (1966), is actually a bit broader than that and allows federal courts to entertain pendent claims when the state and federal claims “derive from a common nucleus of operative fact.” Other old timers call this "ancillary jurisdiction" because the state claim is "ancillary" to the federal claim, which is the foundation of the court's jurisdiction over the claim. Then, in 1990, Congress codified this concept in 28 U.S.C. § 1367, but changed the name to "supplemental jurisdiction"-- and that's the term most younger attorneys now use. The policy rationale for supplemental jurisdiction is efficiency: it doesn't make sense for two courts (one state and one federal) to spend their time hearing the same claim when one court can handle both.

So what does this have to do with web accessibility? Well, if a blind California resident encounters a company's inaccessible website, those barriers could potentially violate ADA Title III (a federal claim) and California's Unruh Act (a state claim). Then, if that plaintiff sued in federal court and tried to bring in both claims, the district could would have to consider if it had supplemental jurisdiction over the Unruh claim.

Normally, this determination is a no-brainer. Federal courts usually handle ancillary state claims. This month, the Central District of California reminded us that this isn't necessarily true with Unruh claims in United African-Asian Abilities Club v. Pacific West Management., LLC, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 216442 (C.D. Cal. 2025). In that case, James Lee’s vision and mobility disabilities prevented him from being able to access the defendant’s website or physical property. Because Unruh claims offer monetary damages starting at $4,000 per violation, there is a strong incentive to bring them. Initially, most of these cases involved physical, architectural barriers and a number of California businesses were targeted. In response, the California legislature passed legislation that made it harder for "high-frequency litigants" to bring "construction-related" Unruh claims in California state court.  In response, plaintiffs just started bringing more claims in federal court. Section 1367(c) lets district courts to refuse to hear ancillary claims in “exceptional circumstances” and, in 2021, the Ninth Circuit held that California’s reaction to construction-related Unruh claims was one of those circumstances. Arroyo v. Rosas, 19 F.4^th 1202 (9^th Cir. 2021). And so the district court in Pacific West Management indicated that it would dismiss the case if the plaintiff could not show why the court shouldn’t follow the Ninth Circuit’s lead and decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over their Unruh claim. I think that’s a natural response to the plaintiff’s architectural claims but it isn’t quite as clear for the website claims.