The lawsuit had been argued and dismissed once before, but was remanded to the trial court in 2010 by a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On September 9, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. again found there was no evidence the city’s firefighter promotion exam “caused a disparate impact on the basis of race.”
The lawsuit in many ways appeared to be a response to the 2009 Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, in which a group of white New Haven firefighters filed suit after the city invalidated the 2003 promotions test because minority candidates did not do well. The white firefighters claimed reverse discrimination, and in a decision that drew national attention, the high court backed their claim.
