Word: thurgood
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Last week, in a 7 to 2 decision, the Supreme Court sidestepped the constitutional problems in the case, but it dealt what dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall called "a fatal blow" to most of the means of enforcing the Civil Rights Act in religious cases. The majority decision, written by Byron White, said that many employees had "strong but perhaps nonreligious reasons for not working on weekends," and that the law cannot be construed to "require an employer to discriminate against some employees in order to enable others to observe their Sabbath." White said there was no objection to employers...
...N.A.A.C.P. Washington Bureau Director Clarence Mitchell: "It seems to me that the court did not do its homework-or at least that seven Justices did not-because the decision distorts the clear intent of Congress. Congress did not intend to preserve a discriminatory seniority system." The two dissenting Justices, Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan, called the decision "devastating." They said it worked against the spirit of the court's own ruling last year that retroactive seniority must be granted to workers who can prove job bias (TIME, April...
...town council passed the idea into law. The ordinance actually had little effect on housing sales, but a real estate agent challenged it, and the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck it down last week. The First Amendment prohibits restrictions on "the free flow of truthful commercial information," wrote Thurgood Marshall, the court's only black Justice. While the ordinance was aimed at "the vital goal" of "promoting stable, racially integrated housing," the court ruled, the censoring of such basic information would enable "every locality in the country [to] suppress any facts that reflect poorly on the locality...
...white friends, I would have lashed out at them from a vortex of primeval anger." And yet, Mitchell went on, he realized that the story "is as much a part of our legacy as Andrew Young being sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by Thurgood Marshall at the White House...
Surprisingly, Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the dissenters in Washington v. Davis, did not quarrel with Justice Powell's interpretation of the Constitution in the Arlington Heights case. They dissented solely on the ground that it should be returned to the lower court to apply that interpretation. Observes Georgetown Law Professor Jerome Shuman: "The new decision continues the shift from judging the effects of discrimination to assessing the intent of the zoning laws, and intent is far more difficult to prove." Adds the director of a fair-housing organization: "The decision raises the standards of proof much higher...