Stacy Seicshnaydre
William K. Christovich Associate Professor of Law, Associate Dean of Experiential Learning and Public Interest Programs
Biography
Stacy Seicshnaydre is a leading authority on fair housing and anti-discrimination law, and her research and writing on housing law and policy have been influential in federal civil rights litigation.
As director of Tulane Law School’s Civil Litigation Clinic from 2004 to 2016, she guided students in the representation of clients on a variety of civil rights cases in federal courts at the district and appellate levels. She was founding executive director and later general counsel of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.
Seicshnaydre clerked for Judge W. Eugene Davis of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then was the first Tulane Law graduate to receive a Skadden Fellowship, through which she worked as a staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C.
She has served on the board of the Inclusive Communities Project and National Fair Housing Alliance and on the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited her work in the landmark disparate impact case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project.
Education
Tulane Law School
University of Notre Dame
Accomplishments
Named as a Bellow Scholar (AALS Section on Clinical Education, Bellow Committee)
2015-2016
Recipient of the AIDSlaw Pro Bono Publico Award
2005
Named as a YWCA Role Model
2005
Recipient of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center’s first inaugural Fair Housing Award
2005
Named as a CityBusiness Leader in Law
2016
Named as a CityBusiness Woman of the Year
2014
Articles
Rigging the Real Estate Market: Segregation, Inequality, and Disaster Risk
2018
New Orleans history and culture is rooted in a unique sense of place. Yet, beneath a shared sense of tradition and culture lies another reality marked by separation, privilege, and disadvantage. The historical and contemporary dividing lines in New Orleans, like in most American cities, fall along categories of black and white, race and ethnicity. Gaining an understanding of the history of neighborhood segregation in New Orleans is essential to appreciating contemporary racial disparities in wealth, access to opportunity, and vulnerability to disaster risk.
Disparate Impact and the Limits of Local Discretion after Inclusive Communities
2016
In upholding the disparate impact theory of liability under the Fair Housing Act (FHA), the Court simultaneously made sweeping pronouncements in favor of residential integration and issued safeguards protecting the legitimate exercise of local discretion in the area of housing policy. Some commentators see these pronouncements as irreconcilable. This Article harmonizes the Court’s competing pronouncements using history, precedent, and the Inclusive Communities opinion itself. The Court eases the tension between federal mandates and local prerogatives by articulating a vision of FHA disparate impact liability as a targeted “barrier removal” mechanism rather than a blunt instrument “displac[ing] valid governmental and private priorities.” As I have explored in earlier work, this is the vision largely implemented by the lower courts for forty years. Justice Kennedy cited this work in acknowledging that “the heartland of disparate-impact suits target[s] artificial barriers to housing.”
Expanding Choice and Opportunity in the Housing Choice Voucher Program
2015
The significance of the housing voucher program in the New Orleans metro area post-Katrina cannot be overstated; the number of housing vouchers in use in Orleans Parish alone more than tripled from 2000 to 2010. Housing vouchers were a primary means of assisting households displaced by Katrina, especially following demolitions of public housing units that housed over 5,000 low-income households before the storm. In this paper, we present data regarding the use of housing vouchers by low-income renters in the pre- and post-disaster New Orleans housing markets; evaluate the subsidies’ effectiveness in increasing access to wider housing opportunity after the storm; and recommend mechanisms to increase the effectiveness of the subsidies in reducing income and racial segregation in the region.
Media Appearances
North Carolina Fights Against Housing Discrimination Rule Change
Host Frank Stasio speaks with Stacy Seicshnaydre, professor of law and associate dean of Experiential Learning and Public Interest Programs at Tulane University about who would be affected by the policy change.
Trump administration now has fair housing in its sights
The Trump administration claims it needs to consider revising the 2013 rule because of the Supreme Court case, but Stacy Seicshnaydre, a law school professor at Tulane University, said nothing in the Supreme Court ruling undermines the HUD rule. “It’s not technically true,” Seicshnaydre said of the Trump administration claims.
Fair Housing Means Integration
The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether longstanding civil rights protections, known as “disparate impact,” will continue to exist under the Fair Housing Act (FHA). Disparate impact allows courts to examine practices that cannot be justified despite disproportionately injuring families, individuals with disabilities, racial minorities and other protected groups. These protections have been around for 40 years and have proven essential to curbing discriminatory policies by state governments, banks and landlords. A remarkable consensus has emerged—among 11 federal appellate courts and the federal agency authorized to interpret and enforce the FHA—that these protections should continue.
What Texas Ruling Means for Fair Housing
“A Supreme Court decision eliminating the disparate impact theory would have been a huge setback,” says Seicshnaydre. “The fact that the district court decided the ICP didn’t prove its case is disappointing, but it doesn’t have the same impact that a Supreme Court decision would have had. Disparate impact theory is still recognized as a good theory, so I think that’s still an incredibly favorable result for the fair housing movement.”
