Washington ? A paraplegic who crawled up two flights of stairs to reach a public courtroom should have expected better under the law mandating that disabled people will not be locked out of buildings and opportunities that are open to others, his lawyer argued Tuesday at the Supreme Court.

“An elevator to a person with disabilities is like the stairs to me,” lawyer William J. Brown told the justices. “It’s the way I get there.”

Brown’s client, George Lane, wants to sue the state of Tennessee for up to $100,000 for what he contends was humiliating treatment. His case is the high court’s latest look at the breadth of civil rights and other protections guaranteed by the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act.

Tennessee contends that Congress went too far in writing the ADA, and that Lane has no right to sue. Lack of an elevator in a small-town courthouse may be unfortunate, but Lane had other options, Tennessee Solicitor General Michael E. Moore argued.

Lane could have consented to be carried up the steps, or courthouses without elevators could hold hearings on the first floor when needed, Moore said.

Tennessee does not dispute that the Polk County courthouse lacked an elevator at the time of Lane’s hearing in 1996, or that the state has a duty to make its services available to all.

The issue for the high court, however, is not whether Tennessee complied with the ADA but what Lane, as a private citizen, can do if the state was remiss.

States are ordinarily immune from lawsuits like Lane’s, where a private citizen seeks money from the state for violation of a federal law. Congress can override that sovereign immunity in certain extraordinary circumstances, but it must demonstrate why that step is necessary.

Demonstrators crawl on their hands and knees across the plaza of the U.S. Supreme Court to draw attention to the Tennessee v. Lane court hearing. The case is a landmark test of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act brought about by two individuals with paraplegia denied access to courthouses in the state of Tennessee.

In a major ruling three years ago, the court’s five-member conservative majority ruled that states cannot be sued by their own employees for failing to comply with the ADA’s guarantee against discrimination in the workplace.

A ruling in the case is expected by summer.