Anna Christensen, analyzing this week's decision in Lewis v Chicago at ScotusBlog, says that the decision ran counter to the pundits' expectations:
Had the petitioners in Lewis v. Chicago (No. 08-974) heeded the current wisdom of the commentariat and the legal academy, they might never have tried to take their case to the Court. After all, they were minority firefighters alleging claims of disparate impact discrimination based on the City of Chicago’s use of the results of a performance exam—almost the mirror image of Ricci v. DeStefano (No. 08-328), last term’s decision in favor of white firefighters who alleged discrimination in the City of New Haven’s failure to use the results of a similar test (and on which the Court had granted cert. by the time the Lewis petitioners filed their petition). Moreover, the case was dismissed by the Seventh Circuit as barred by the statute of limitations; to prevail, petitioners would have to establish that they are entitled to challenge the effects of a discriminatory policy even though the statute of limitations would prevent them from challenging the establishment of the discriminatory policy itself. Not exactly the ideal case to press before a Court thought to be conservative on Title VII. But petitioners ignored this conventional wisdom, and yesterday they were rewarded: in a unanimous opinion by Justice Scalia, the Court not only held that petitioners’ disparate impact claims were not precluded by the statute of limitations, but also actually expanded the range of circumstances in which disparate impact lawsuits can be raised.
