SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports on oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday about a civil rights doctrine that rejects discrimination in housing even if it is not intentional, so long as it has a "disparate impact" on minorities: "At issue in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project is how far Congress went in 1968 in banning racial discrimination in home sales or rentals: did it only ban intentional bias, or did it also outlaw housing policies that simply have a negative effect on minorities?"
The Fair Housing Act, a key law in prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, was passed in 1968 shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
Justice Antonin Scalia was on both sides of the issue during the oral arguments, reflecting the overall split in the bench on the issue, Denniston reports.
Fair housing advocates are concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its five-member conservative majority, took up the case even though there is not a split between the circuit court of appeals in applying the disparate impact doctrine in fair housing cases. Elizabeth Julian, president of the Inclusive Communities Project and the former Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at HUD, told ProPublica "the end of disparate impact policies and cases ... would severely hamper advocates’ ability to go after systemic housing discrimination in a nation where the segregation of black Americans has barely budged in many cities and where it is growing for Latinos."
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