Court Opinion

ID: 9426171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:01.471639+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.414675
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
With all respect, I think that the Court reads the complaint and the record with antagonistic eyes. There are in the background of this case continuing strong tides of opinion touching on very sensitive matters, some of which involve race, some class distinctions based on wealth.
A clean, safe, and well-heated home is not enough for some people. Some want to live where the neighbors are congenial and have social and political outlooks similar to their own. This problem of sharing areas of the community is akin to that when one wants to control the kind of person who shares his own abode. Metro-Act of Rochester, Inc., and the Housing Council in the Monroe County Area, Inc. — two of the associations which bring this suit — do in my opinion represent the communal feeling of the actual residents and have standing.
The associations here are in a position not unlike that confronted by the Court in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449 (1958). Their protest against the creation of this segregated community expresses the desire of their members to live in a desegregated community — a desire which gives standing to sue under the Civil Rights Act *519of 1968 as we held in Trafficante v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 409 U. S. 205 (1972). Those who voice these views here seek to rely on other Civil Rights Acts and on the Constitution, but they too should have standing, by virtue of the dignity of their claim, to have the case decided on the merits.
Standing has become a barrier to access to the federal courts, just as “the political question” was in earlier decades. The mounting caseload of federal courts is well known. But cases such as this one reflect festering sores in our society; and the American dream teaches that if one reaches high enough and persists there is a forum where justice is dispensed. I would lower the technical barriers and let the courts serve that ancient need. They can in time be curbed by legislative or constitutional restraints if an emergency arises.
We are today far from facing an emergency. For in all frankness, no Justice of this Court need work more than four days a week to carry his burden. I have found it a comfortable burden carried even in my months of hospitalization.
As Mr. Justice Brennan makes clear in his dissent, the alleged purpose of the ordinance under attack was to preclude low- and moderate-income people and nonwhites from living in Penfield. The zoning power is claimed to have been used here to foist an un-American community model on the people of this area. I would let the case go to trial and have all the facts brought out. Indeed, it would be better practice to decide the question of standing only when the merits have been developed.
I would reverse the Court of Appeals.