Legal Update: May 2026

I couldn’t help but think about the movie, My Cousin Vinny as I wrote this blog post. Back in February 2023, we started noticing that federal district courts in New York were turning to the Second Circuit opinion in Calcano v. Swarovski, 36 F.4th 68 (2d Cir. 2022) to dismiss web accessibility claims filed by serial plaintiffs because they offered no evidence of a genuine “intent to return” in their complaints. Since then, we’ve blogged about the dozens of complaints thrown out by New York federal courts, but until recently, California courts refrained from using it. Well, that changed this month.

The easiest way to understand Calcano’s intent-to-return test is to think of the schoolyard expression, “no harm, no foul.” Something that may violate the law shouldn’t give rise to a violation if no one is harmed by it. In the case of web accessibility, this means that a person who has no intent to return to a website wouldn’t be injured by inaccessible features on that website. Of course, the courts didn’t come up with this idea out of thin air. Instead, Article III of the U.S. Constitution only gives federal courts the ability to hear “cases or controversies.” Through a long line of opinions, this gave rise to the concept of standing to sue, which requires that the plaintiff show an “injury” to a legally protected interest that is both (1) concrete and particularized and (2) actual or imminent. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992). How do you show an actual or imminent injury in a web accessibility case? According to the Calcano court, the plaintiff must show an actual intent to return to the website and complete a transaction.

This month’s transcontinental tour starts appropriately enough in New York. In Mercedes v. Restaurant Management Inc., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 98215 (S.D.N.Y. 2026), a blind plaintiff sued over the inaccessible website of a steakhouse in Islip, saying he wanted to make a reservation. Applying Calcano, the court found his professed intent to return implausible: the restaurant sat nearly fifty miles from his Bronx home, he had never been there, and his complaint recycled boilerplate paragraphs his counsel had filed in other cases. It granted the motion to dismiss for lack of standing.

Then Calcano travelled west to visit his cousins in California. His cousins turned out to be four nearly identical orders from the Central District of California—and, notably, none of them involved a website at all. Each was a physical-access case: an inaccessible entrance in Maldonado v. Om, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 119442 (C.D. Cal. 2026) and Weilch v. Filippini, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 118371 (C.D. Cal.  2026); disabled-parking violations in Gomez v. New City Auto Corp., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 100745 (C.D. Cal. 2026), and Tapias v. Ramirez, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 101004 (C.D. Cal. 2026). In every one, the court declined supplemental jurisdiction over the Unruh Act claim and then dismissed the remaining ADA claim for lack of standing—each plaintiff professed a wish to return but gave no date, not even a month or year, leaving any future injury too speculative. All four were dismissed with leave to amend. Because California sits in the Ninth Circuit, Calcano is only persuasive. Instead almost all of these opinions relied on Feezor v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 608 F. App'x 476, 477 (9th Cir. 2015)—a short, four-paragraph opinion that wasn’t a web accessibility case at all.

a plaintiff's profession of an intent to return to the places he had visited before is not sufficient to establish standing because such 'some day' intentions-without any description of concrete plans, or indeed any specification of when the some day will be-do not support a finding of the 'actual or imminent' injury that our cases require.

Feezor, at 477. While it doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Calcano, we can expect to see Feezor again soon as California district courts make better use of “intent to return” as a way to dismiss web accessibility lawsuits. Last month’s opinion in Merrell is probably just a sign of what is coming.