Friday, June 26, 2015

U.S. Supreme Court: Attention Landlords You Might Be Liable For Being A Racist Even If There's No Proof

The American Spectator
Stop calling it fair housing law. If it was ever a matter of fairness, it isn’t now.

Under today’s 5-4 Supreme Court holding in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, you can be held liable for housing discrimination whether or not you or anyone in your organization intended to discriminate. Instead — to quote Justice Anthony Kennedy, who joined with the Court’s four liberals in a 5-4 majority — you might have been influenced by “unconscious prejudice” or “stereotyping” when you lent money or rented apartments or carried on appraisal or brokerage or planning functions. What you did had “disparate impact” on some race or other legally protected group, and now you’re caught up in potentially ruinous litigation in which it’s up to you to show that you had a good reason for what you did and could not have arranged your actions in some other way that had less disparate impact.


Will the EEOC be picking tenants for you sooner than you think?