Abstract
Fifty years ago, when I was two years out of law school, I began work on a case—Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. v. Village of Arlington Heights—that was destined to take on epic proportions in the housing discrimination field. The case started with a complaint filed in 1972, shortly before I joined the plaintiffs’ legal team, and was not finally resolved until 1980, after I’d left that team to become a law professor. During the seven years that I worked on the Arlington Heights case, it produced a major Supreme Court decision on standing and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause3 and, on remand, an important decision by the Seventh Circuit on the 1968 Fair Housing Act (“FHA”). A recent Westlaw search reveals that the Supreme Court’s Arlington Heights decision has been cited over 20,450 times, more than many of the most iconic civil rights decisions of the past century; and the Seventh Circuit’s remand decision is the second-most-cited of all FHA appellate decisions.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Repository Citation
Schwemm, Robert G., "Reflections on Arlington Heights: Fifty Years of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation and Beyond" (2024). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 774.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/774
Notes/Citation Information
Robert G. Schwemm, Reflections on Arlington Heights: Fifty Years of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation and Beyond, 57 UIC L. REV. 389 (2024).