In what’s being widely hailed as a gigantic victory for civil rights law, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday to uphold the use of disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. The much-debated theory of disparate impact centers around how certain practices, in this case related to housing, could be deemed discriminatory — based not on intent, but on the resulting poor impact on a minority group.

“To be candid, many people in the civil rights advocacy community were very pessimistic about the outcome of this case, I among them,” Ted Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the UNC School of Law at Chapel Hill and former director-counselor of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said yesterday. “I did not think there was much of a chance of prevailing in this case, given the direction of this court in civil rights cases. So this is a good day. … I can’t tell you how gratified I am.”

Days before the decision, Frank Alexander, co-founder of the Center for Community Progress and a professor at Emory Law, said that the loss of disparate impact would have gutted the Fair Housing Act.

“If the Supreme Court elects to reject the possibility of discriminatory impact, it’s going to basically be undoing the last 45 years of Fair Housing Act enforcement,” explained Alexander. “That result would make it incredibly difficult for the Fair Housing Act to be enforced except when the defendant actually says, ‘I refuse to rent to you because of your race … .’” This too would’ve applied to discrimination disputes in real estate transactions. Alexander said that the loss of disparate impact could have welcomed a variety of dangerous practices, among them shadow redlining on the part of mortgage lenders and a clustering of special needs housing through inadvisable tax credit allocations.