Justices testy as Texas pushes to end use of ‘disparate impacts’ in housing discrimination cases
Source: Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON—Supreme Court justices treated harshly Texas’ arguments this morning that the Fair Housing Act should allow lawsuits for discrimination only when the plaintiffs can prove the policies that harm them were intentionally racist.
It’s no guarantee that Texas will lose its appeal, which seeks to strike out the widespread uses in federal courts the doctrine of ‘disparate impacts’ as a grounds for lawsuits alleging housing discrimination. (See our preview story, here.) Oral arguments are always just a chance for the justices to use the lawyers before them as vehicles to argue with each other, trying to win over wavering colleagues and flesh out the arguments they hope will prevail when they discuss the case later.
But the strong acceptance by many of the justices — including conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — that the statute as written in 1968 and amended in 1988 seems to clearly indicate Congress’s intent to allow the suits is hard to see as anything but optimistic for the plaintiffs from Dallas that initiated the case in 2008.
In 1968, during the week that many American cities burned as protests flared following the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. In it, it prohibited policies that intentionally discriminate against renters or buyers on the basis of their race and a handful of other characteristics.
Read more: http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2015/01/justices-testy-as-texas-pushes-to-end-use-of-disparate-impacts-in-housing-discrimination-cases.html/