The final selection would be governed by a provision in the City Charter referred to as the "Rule of Three", which mandated that a civil service position be filled from among the three individuals with the highest scores on the exam.

He alleged the attack was orchestrated by a black firefighter in retribution for filing the legal case, but the co-worker in question strongly denied the charge.

Vargas quit the Hispanic firefighters' association, whose members include his brother, after the group declined to support his legal case.

Among other things, the suit alleged that, by discarding the test results, the City and the named officials discriminated against the plaintiffs based on their race, in violation of both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 Stat.

The City and the officials defended their actions, arguing that if they had certified the results, they could have faced liability under Title VII for adopting a practice that had a disparate impact on the minority firefighters.

[18] The Court held the city of New Haven violated the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discarding the test scores.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, "In order to fit the examinations to the New Haven Department, IOS began the test-design process by performing job analyses to identify the tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities that are essential for the lieutenant and captain positions.

"[19] The process that IOS used to design their test for the job analyses portion included interviews of incumbent captains and lieutenants and their supervisors, and ride-along observations of other on-duty officers.

The District Court was wrong to argue that respondents' "motivation to avoid making promotions based on a test with a racially disparate impact ... does not, as a matter of law, constitute discriminatory intent.

Looking to analogous Equal Protection cases,[26] he reached the statutory construction that, in instances of conflict between the disparate-treatment and disparate-impact provisions, permissible justifications for disparate treatment must be grounded in the strong-basis-in-evidence standard.

He concluded that "once [a] process has been established and employers have made clear their selection criteria, they may not then invalidate the test results, thus upsetting an employee's legitimate expectation not to be judged on the basis of race.

Doing so, absent a strong basis in evidence of an impermissible disparate impact, amounts to the sort of racial preference that Congress has disclaimed, §2000e–2(j), and is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race.

The test results produced significant racial adverse impact, and confronted the City with a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability.

That compelled them to "take a hard look at the examinations" to determine whether certifying the results would have had an impermissible disparate impact: The problem for respondents is that a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability — essentially, a threshold showing of a significant statistical disparity,[37] and nothing more — is far from a strong basis in evidence that the City would have been liable under Title VII had it certified the results.

§2000e–2(k)(1)(A), (C).Neither condition holds: Kennedy continues: He concluded: The record in this litigation documents a process that, at the outset, had the potential to produce a testing procedure that was true to the promise of Title VII: No individual should face workplace discrimination based on race.

Many of the candidates had studied for months, at considerable personal and financial expense, and thus the injury caused by the City's reliance on raw racial statistics at the end of the process was all the more severe.

By order of this Court, New Haven, a city in which African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of the population, must today be served—as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination—by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are rarely seen in command positions.

In arriving at its order, the Court barely acknowledges the pathmarking decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U. S. 424 (1971), which explained the centrality of the disparate-impact concept to effective enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

These stark disparities, the Court acknowledges, sufficed to state a prima facie case under Title VII's disparate-impact provision.

See ante, at 27 ("The pass rates of minorities ... f[e]ll well below the 80-percent standard set by the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)] to implement the disparate-impact provision of Title VII.").

City officials referred the matter to the New Haven Civil Service Board (CSB), the entity responsible for certifying the results of employment exams.

At the first meeting, New Haven's Corporation Counsel, Thomas Ude, described the legal standard governing Title VII disparate-impact claims.

A Title VII plaintiff may attempt to rebut an employer's showing of job-relatedness and necessity by identifying alternative selection methods that would have been at least as valid but with "less of an adverse or disparate or discriminatory effect."

... Respondents were no doubt conscious of race during their decisionmaking process, the court acknowledged, but this did not mean they had engaged in racially disparate treatment.

New Haven's action, which gave no individual a preference, "was 'simply not analogous to a quota system or a minority set-aside where candidates, on the basis of their race, are not treated uniformly.'

... A reasonable endeavor to comply with the law and to ensure that qualified candidates of all races have a fair opportunity to compete is simply not what Congress meant to interdict.

Faragher v. Boca Raton, 524 U. S. 775, 806 (1998) (observing that it accords with "clear statutory policy" for employers "to prevent violations" and "make reasonable efforts to discharge their duty" under Title VII).

Employers may attempt to comply with Title VII's disparate-impact provision, the Court declares, only where there is a "strong basis in evidence" documenting the necessity of their action.

By instructing employers to avoid needlessly exclusionary selection processes, Title VII's disparate-impact provision calls for a "race-neutral means to increase minority ... participation"—something this Court's equal protection precedents also encourage.

"The very radicalism of holding disparate impact doctrine unconstitutional as a matter of equal protection," moreover, "suggests that only a very uncompromising court would issue such a decision."