Airbnb Turns to Kaplan in Bid to Overturn NYC Law Demanding Host Info
In Airbnb Inc.'s new lawsuit against the New York City government over its law requiring disclosure of hosts offering up rooms for rent in the city, the company has once again enlisted the legal firepower of Roberta Kaplan, a star litigator well-known for her civil rights work.
August 28, 2018 at 05:49 PM
4 minute read
In Airbnb Inc.'s new lawsuit against the New York City government over its law requiring disclosure of hosts offering up rooms for rent in the city, the company has once again enlisted the legal firepower of Roberta Kaplan, a star litigator well-known for her civil rights work.
Kaplan, who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law that effectively banned same-sex marriage, is teaming up with Sharon Nelles of Sullivan & Cromwell, arguing that the city's new law is an “extraordinary” act of government overreach that was the product of a multimillion-dollar campaign by the hotel industry and was designed to frighten New Yorkers into giving up home sharing.
The law, which was passed in a time when New York City has begun to take a more aggressive approach toward regulating gig economy giants like Airbnb and Uber, requires Airbnb to turn over the names and addresses of its hosts, as well as the prices they charge, on a monthly basis.
“It should come as no surprise that this surveillance regime far exceeds in scope and severity the regulations imposed on any other industry in New York City. New York City hotels are not required to disclose this same information about all of their patrons' stays,” the company alleged in the suit, which was filed on Aug. 24 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Kaplan recently left Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to start a firm now called Kaplan Hecker & Fink.
“Sharon Nelles and I are proud to represent Airbnb in this important lawsuit seeking to strike a NYC ordinance that is truly unprecedented in scope and intrusiveness,” Kaplan said in written statement. ”Like other cases I have litigated in my career, this case involves enforcing fundamental constitutional rights, this time the core value of privacy under the Fourth Amendment and federal Stored Communications Act.”
In addition to Kaplan and Nelles, Airbnb is being represented by Sullivan & Cromwell special counsel John McCarthy and Kaplan Hecker's John Quinn.
Assistant Corporation Counsel Karen Selvin of the New York City Law Department is appearing for the city in the case.
“This law provides the city with the critical data it needs to preserve our housing stock, keep visitors safe, and ensure residents feel secure in their homes and neighborhoods, and the city will defend it,” said Christian Klossner, executive director of the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement, which enforces the city's rules on short-term rentals and would be tasked with collecting the home-sharing data that Airbnb is supposed to provide.
Prior to the passage of the new regulations for Airbnb, city leaders have argued that Airbnb was allowing some New Yorkers to get away with using their apartments as year-round hotels, putting residents' safety at risk, increasing rents and in some cases placing rent-regulated and rent-stabilized apartments out of reach of low-income tenants.
The lawsuit is not the first time that Kaplan has gone to battle for the home-sharing service. She represented the company in 2014 in its clash with the New York state government as then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was also seeking host data to determine if apartments were being rented out illegally through the service.
In 2015, Kaplan co-authored an article for the University of Chicago Law Review that faulted “poorly drafted laws” to regulate Airbnb that fail to account for the challenges presented by the sharing economy and how the company entered into negotiations with Schneiderman in which it agreed to provide anonymized data to his office to help it track down illegal hoteliers.
Kaplan also defended the company against a suit filed by a real estate broker, which a Manhattan federal judge dismissed last year.
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