| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | Candidates for the police academy need to score at least 40 on "Test 21," a civil service exam. |
| Posture: | Test is sustained by district court, but invalidated on appeal. |
| Issue: | Is the test valid? |
| Holding: | Yes, reversed. |
| Rule: | Disproportionate impact alone does not indicate a constitutional violation that would demand strict scrutiny; it must be tied to a discriminatory purpose. |
| Reasoning: | The court of appeals looked at Title VII. There's disparate impact
here, to be sure-- the numbers don't lie. But the constitutional
standard is different from the Title VII standard. 14A is about
prohibiting official conduct discriminating on the basis of race.
We've never said that a law or other official act, is invalid
solely because of its impact. In fact, that's the difference
between de jure segregation (which all the school cases
were about) and de facto segregation.
A neutral statute could be applied in a discriminatory way, of course, and that would be bad. And sometimes we can infer a discriminatory purpose from the facts. Nevertheless, a law, neutral on its face, and serving ends within the government's power to pursue, does not offend Equal Protection merely because of its impact. The impact isn't irrelevant, but it's not the only thing. |
| Dicta: | |