Bias Decision Could Affect Wide Variety of Issues

A Supreme Court decision making it harder to sue agencies for systemic discrimination may have effects on such varied fronts as women’s sports funding, environmental justice, racial profiling by police and discrimination by private charities, legal experts said Wednesday.

The ruling also weakens a part of federal civil rights law that has played a central role in numerous local dramas in recent years, from IQ testing in schools to expenditures on MTA bus service to the expansion of Los Angeles International Airport.

Before Tuesday’s 5-4 high court ruling, courts had interpreted federal law to mean that private parties could sue certain agencies over policies that had discriminatory results--even if discrimination was not the agencies’ intent. The Supreme Court, ruling in a case that involved a state’s English-only policy, has now said they can’t.

The ruling was applauded by some lawyers as an overdue clarification of federal law. But it was a blow to civil rights advocates, who said they lost a favorite weapon against discrimination in the form it most commonly takes today: not deliberate expressions of racial preferences, but byproducts of complex government and other institutional policies.

“You don’t generally have police officers say, ‘I’m stopping you because you’re black,’ ” said Dan Tokaji, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles. “Those who are engaging in discrimination are much more savvy about it than they used to be. . . . Government discrimination has become more sophisticated.”

In their zeal to pursue such cases, however, activists attacked agencies that never meant any harm, countered Elsa Kirchner Cole, general counsel for the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.

As an example of good intentions gone awry, she cited a lawsuit against the NCAA in which plaintiffs have contended that the organization discriminates because it uses minimum test scores to determine eligibility for college sports.

Cole said the NCAA started requiring test scores after critics accused it of exploiting athletes who were admitted to colleges without the skills to do the academic work.

“We did this for all the right reasons, and then we were accused of all the wrong reasons,” she said.

The high court ruling Tuesday settled a lawsuit by Martha Sandoval, who had sued Alabama for adopting an English-only policy for residents seeking driver’s licenses, arguing that the result was discriminatory. The Supreme Court overturned Sandoval’s lower-court victory.

At issue Tuesday was Title VI of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination by agencies receiving federal grants. In past decades, discrimination had been interpreted to mean not simply deliberate discrimination, but systems or policies that have discriminatory results. Private lawsuits have been a common means of enforcing regulations associated with Title VI in recent years.

But as a result of Tuesday’s ruling, private lawsuits can no longer be brought to enforce Title VI regulations. Plaintiffs must instead show intentional discrimination, which is almost always harder to prove.

The ruling leaves a door open for federal officials to enforce Title VI regulations on their own. And legal experts said that, in the case of public agencies, a separate provision of federal law--a section of a civil rights code adopted in 1871--may still allow private lawsuits on the grounds of systemic discrimination.

That means the clearest effect of the ruling is on private institutions that receive federal funds, such as private universities, and on social service organizations, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor at the USC Law Center. Those who wish to prove that such entities discriminate must now show that they do it intentionally.

Private-university attorneys were already anticipating the ruling’s implications for a related provision of federal law--Title IX, which has a similar structure to Title VI, but relates to gender discrimination.

Title IX has been important in promoting funding for women’s sports programs, sometimes at the expense of men’s programs.

Los Angeles attorney Paul Grossman, one of California’s leading employment lawyers, said the Supreme Court decision “will be a significant benefit [to universities] in defending themselves against Title IX litigation.” Grossman said his firm, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, advises several private universities about their obligations under Title IX.

In the wake of Tuesday’s ruling, any lawsuit based on Title IX alleging that a university has to make equal expenditures for male and female sports programs on a student-per-student basis will now “have to focus on whether there was intentional discrimination rather than disparate impact,” Grossman said.

Other major education-related discrimination suits pending in California--including one involving Advanced Placement classes in high schools and another alleging inferior classroom conditions--are unlikely to be dramatically affected because they primarily involve state, not federal, laws.

Legal experts noted Wednesday that much of the California landscape has been molded by the body of civil rights law the Supreme Court restricted this week.

In the 1980s, for example, schools dispensed with IQ tests because of legal challenges alleging that the practice disparately affected minorities, Chemerinsky said.

Activists also cited alleged discriminatory effects under Title VI in the course of a mediated settlement that forced the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to spend more on buses to ensure that minority riders were being served, said Robert Garcia, an attorney with the Center for Law in the Public Interest.

Similarly, adherence to the regulations under Title VI have been a key aspect of negotiations over the proposed expansion of LAX and reform of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was pivotal in talks that led to plans for a park rather than warehouses on the vacant Cornfield property in Chinatown.