The Trump administration is planning a far-reaching rollback of civil rights law

An internal Justice Department memo directed senior civil rights officials to examine how disparate impact regulations can be changed or removed, the Washington Post reports.

Disparate impact is the idea in civil rights law that a rule might be discriminatory even if it doesn’t have that intent.

For example, the Obama administration reached a settlement with the Lodi Unified School District in California after it found that several seemingly neutral policies – like allowing schools within the district to set their own disciplinary policies, and schools with a higher percentage of African American students having tougher punishments for the same disciplinary incidents – resulted in a negative impact on black people, even though Obama administration lawyers never proved a racist intent.

“Disparate impact is a bedrock principle,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Through the courts, we’ve been able to marshal data and use the disparate-impact doctrine as a robust tool for ferreting out discrimination.”

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