Fifty years ago, on this day in late March, the United States was about to go through one of the darkest stretches in modern American history. At the end of March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. Just a few days later, of course, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which eventually would lead to the enfranchisement of millions of African Americans. It was the high point of the Civil Rights Movement, its “Hallelujah, ’Tis Done” moment. Five days later, violence erupted in the largely Black community of Watts in Los Angeles.
In 2018, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) turned fifty. There has been a plethora of commemorations of that important event in the life of the United States throughout the year, including The Fair Housing Act After Fifty Years symposium held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on March 28, 2018. The story of the passage of the FHA is, like most legislation, the story of negotiation and compromise as much as principle and purpose.
On the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, progress towards the Act’s goals of non-discrimination and integration is uneven. On both fronts, the last fifty years have seen some progress, but by several accounts more progress has been made on the anti-discrimination front than in advancing integration.
Cities can adapt AFFH as an urban fair housing rubric by specifically implementing reforms such as inclusionary zoning, rent control, right to civil council, and voucher and foreclosure discrimination enforcement.
Fair, safe, and affordable housing is about much more than housing. It is about human dignity. It is about access to health care, wellness, quality education, transportation, career opportunity, security, longer life expectancy, and overall quality of life.
Over the past decade, several city governments across the country have filed suits against banks pursuant to the Fair Housing Act seeking redress for municipal damages caused by the banks’ discriminatory lending practices. Following the ruling in Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami, lower courts are now confronting the question of where to “draw the line” of proximate causation under the Fair Housing Act.
Integration in schools and housing often seems to be positioned as a zero-sum game; whites versus people of color. One strand of this argument suggests that if schools and neighborhoods remain segregated, as they presently are, white families will remain the winners.
A limited strict liability tort regime is the most versatile and customizable standard for judging these actions in the current climate. This will allow lethal fully autonomous weapons systems to fall under a strict liability regime, while semi-autonomous and non-lethal autonomous weapons will fall under a negligence standard.
When a company’s connections and conduct in a state are so persistent and render it benefits to the tune of millions of dollars in profit, subjecting it to personal jurisdiction in the forum with those contacts does not violate due process standards.