{"id":182704,"date":"2015-06-26T20:03:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T01:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/06\/26\/yesterday-the-supreme-court-issued-another-important-opinion\/"},"modified":"2015-06-26T20:03:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T01:03:00","slug":"yesterday-the-supreme-court-issued-another-important-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/06\/26\/yesterday-the-supreme-court-issued-another-important-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday, the Supreme Court Issued Another Important Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Specifically, in <i>Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project<\/i> the Supreme Court <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scotusblog.com\/2015\/06\/disparate-impact-claims-survive-challenge-in-plain-english\/\">allowed disparate impact to continue to be considered in fair housing lawsuits<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Civil rights groups are breathing a little easier today, after the  Court\u2019s ruling in an important housing discrimination case. The question  before the Court was whether claims brought under the Fair Housing Act,  which prohibits housing discrimination \u201cbecause of\u201d race, can be based  on an allegation that a law or practice has a \u201cdisparate impact\u201d \u2013 that  is, it has a discriminatory <i>effect<\/i>, even if it wasn\u2019t motivated by an <i>intent<\/i>  to discriminate. The distinction matters because it\u2019s rare for a  lawmaker, landlord, or developer to admit that a law or practice is  intended to be discriminatory; civil rights groups believe that  disparate-impact claims are an important tool to ferret out more subtle  examples of housing discrimination.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I expected the court to go the other way, which would have made pursuing issues in housing discrimination nearly impossible.<\/p>\n<p>As an aside, I believe that this also would also make it easier to pursue disparate impact challenges under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which, after the Supreme Court gutted section 5 a few years back, is the most effective portion of the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Specifically, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project the Supreme Court allowed disparate impact to continue to be considered in fair housing lawsuits: Civil rights groups are breathing a little easier today, after the Court\u2019s ruling in an important housing discrimination case. The question before the Court was whether &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,972,1084],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-justice","category-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182704"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}