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The Surprising Career of Federal Fair Housing Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2012

Hugh Davis Graham
Hugh Davis Graham
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2000 , pp. 215 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2000

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References

Notes

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30. The Grove City bill, sponsored by the civil rights coalition in Congress and opposed by the Reagan administration, would expand the authority of federal agencies, narrowed in 1984 by the Supreme Court in Grove City College v. Bell, to require public and private institutions receiving federal financial assistance to abide by federal agency rules concerning equal employment opportunity for minorities, women, and the handicapped, consumer and environmental protection, and workplace and transportation safety. See Graham, Hugh Davis, “The Storm over Grove City College: Civil Rights Regulation, Higher Education, and the Reagan Administration,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Winter 1998): 407–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33. Curtis v. Loether, 415 U.S. 189 (1974); Tull v. United States, 481 U.S. 412 (1987). In Loether the Court held that a claim to actual or compensatory damages under the Fair Housing Act “sounds basically in tort” and under the Seventh Amendment requires a jury trial in an Article III court. In Tull the Court required a jury trial in federal district court in an action brought by the United States seeking equitable relief and civil penalties pursuant to the Clean Water Act. Because the court had not ruled on administrative remedies, it was unclear in such circumstances whether a civil penalty levied by a HUD administrative law judge constituted equitable make-whole relief and hence was not covered by the Seventh Amendment, or was a punitive action at law impermissible without a jury trial in federal district court. Under Tull, punitive damages were subject to the Seventh Amendment's jury trial requirement.

34. Larry A. Hammond to Ruth T. Prokop, 25 January 1978, box 6, Addington files, RRL.

35. Thomas D. Casey to David Addington, 3 May 1988, box 7, Addington files, RRL; Alan M. Kranowitzx to Kenneth M. Duberstein, 17 June 1988, and Kranowitz to Duberstein, 22 July 1988, HU-014, WHORM, RRL; “Fair-Housing Bill Begins Uncertain Journey,” CQWR 46 (23 April 1988): 1082–23Google Scholar.

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45. For claims by conservative critics that the Clinton administration has pressed affirmative-action enforcement in housing policy, applying disparate impact standards not only to providers of housing but to lenders and insurers as well, see Detlefsen, Robert R., “Thin Red Line,” National Review 50 (21 December 1998): 34–35Google Scholar; and Clegg, Roger, “The Bad Law of Disparate Impact,” The Public Interest 128 (Winter 2000): 79–90Google Scholar.