Legal Commentary

Can you tell a $1 bill apart from a $20 bill with your eyes closed? For that matter, can you even be sure it is in fact a bill? If you're vision-impaired it can be difficult or impossible to distinguish US paper currency of different denominations. Unlike just about every other Western country, all of our bills are the same size, same color (excluding some recent changes to keep the North Korean government's counterfeiters at bay), and same texture. The inability to distinguish between paper currency denominations makes the vision-impaired extremely vulnerable in cash transactions; they can easily tender too much money or receive too little change. Prof. Otis Stephens at UT College of Law explained this poignantly: I cannot emphasize enough the feelings of insecurity and vulnerability which I experience whenever I engage in currency transactions, due to my inability to distinguish between denominations.?

The American Council of the Blind sued and won in district court over the Treasury's objections to the cost and bother of having to change the currency. Now the D.C. Circuit has upheld the district court. Treasury may yet appeal, but money might look and feel very different in coming years.

Frankly, as someone who is not vision impaired, more easily distinguishable bills will make me feel much more comfortable dealing with cash--I won't having that nagging worry that I handed the cabbie a $20 instead of a $10.

Curiously, the dissent seemed particularly concerned with the impact on third-parties, like vending machine makers, if the currency were changed. That strikes me as quite strange--isn't this a problem every time the currency is updated. I know there are still plenty of machines that won't take the new $20s. This just strikes me as a known risk of being in the vending machine business. My own interest in this is from the payments side; disability law is not my field. I'm curious if in a disability law case like this brought against the government the court is supposed to consider third-party externalities.