Albertson's, Inc. v. Kirkingburg, 527 U.S. 555, 2 (1999)

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556

ALBERTSON'S, INC. v. KIRKINGBURG

Syllabus

although it relied on an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulation that defines "substantially limits" as requiring a "significant restrict[ion]" in an individual's manner of performing a major life activity, see 29 CFR § 1630.2(j)(ii), the court actually found that there was merely a significant "difference" between the manner in which Kirkingburg sees and the manner in which most people see. By transforming "significant restriction" into "difference," the court undercut the fundamental statutory requirement that only impairments that substantially limit the ability to perform a major life activity constitute disabilities. Second, the court appeared to suggest that it need not take account of a monocular individual's ability to compensate for the impairment, even though it acknowledged that Kirkingburg's brain had subconsciously done just that. Mitigating measures, however, must be taken into account in judging whether an individual has a disability, Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc., ante, at 482, whether the measures taken are with artificial aids, like medications and devices, or with the body's own systems. Finally, the Ninth Circuit did not pay much heed to the statutory obligation to determine a disability's existence on a case-by-case basis. See 42 U. S. C. § 12101(2). Some impairments may invariably cause a substantial limitation of a major life activity, but monocularity is not one of them, for that category embraces a group whose members vary by, e. g., the degree of visual acuity in the weaker eye, the extent of their compensating adjustments, and the ultimate scope of the restrictions on their visual abilities. Pp. 562-567.

2. An employer who requires as a job qualification that an employee meet an otherwise applicable federal safety regulation does not have to justify enforcing the regulation solely because its standard may be waived experimentally in an individual case. Pp. 567-578.

(a) Petitioner's job qualification was not of its own devising, but was the visual acuity standard of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, and is binding on Albertson's, see 49 CFR § 391.11. The validity of these regulations is unchallenged, they have the force of law, and they contain no qualifying language about individualized determinations. Were it not for the waiver program, there would be no basis for questioning petitioner's decision, and right, to follow the regulations. Pp. 567-570.

(b) The regulations establishing the waiver program did not modify the basic visual acuity standard in a way that disentitles an employer like Albertson's to insist on the basic standard. One might assume that the general regulatory standard and the regulatory waiver standard ought to be accorded equal substantive significance, but that is not the case here. In setting the basic standards, the Federal Highway Admin-

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