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Justices Souter, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg's dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday. Speaking dismissively of the majority opinion, she predicted the court's ruling "will not have staying power."

Labor and employment lawyers suggested that companies that act to encourage and preserve racial, gender and age diversity would need to be very careful to avoid reverse discrimination lawsuits.

For example, said employment lawyer Mark Dichter, an employer might be sued under Monday's ruling for scrapping an unannounced round of layoffs because women, racial minorities or older workers would be disproportionately affected and substituting a different analysis that affected other workers.

"If those facts came out, it would certainly support a reverse discrimination claim," said Dichter, chairman of the Morgan, Lewis law firm's labor and employment division in Philadelphia.

In New Haven, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. criticized the court's decision. The court's "interpretation of anti-discrimination law has for some time been showing increasing distance from reasonable and time-tested efforts," he said.

However, lead plaintiff Frank Ricci, speaking from the steps of New Haven's city hall, said the ruling showed that "if you work hard, you can succeed in America."

Monday's decision has its origins in New Haven's need to fill vacancies for lieutenants and captains in its fire department. It hired an outside firm to design a test, which was given to 77 candidates for lieutenant and 41 candidates for captain.

Fifty-six firefighters passed the exams, including 41 whites, nine blacks and six Hispanics. But of those, only 17 whites and two Hispanics could expect promotion.

The city eventually decided not to use the exam to determine promotions. It said it acted because it might have been vulnerable to claims that the exam had a "disparate impact" on minorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The white firefighters said the decision violated the same law's prohibition on intentional discrimination. The lawsuit was filed by 20 white plaintiffs, including one man who is both white and Hispanic.

"The city could be liable for disparate-impact discrimination only if the examinations were not job related" or the city failed to use a less discriminatory alternative, Kennedy said. "We conclude that there is no strong basis in evidence to establish that the test was deficient in either of these respects."

But Ginsburg said the court should have assessed "the starkly disparate results" of the exams against the backdrop of historical and ongoing inequality in the New Haven fire department. As of 2003, she said, only one of the city's 21 fire captains was African-American.

Until this decision, Ginsburg said, the civil rights law's prohibitions on intentional discrimination and disparate impact were complementary, both aimed at ending workplace discrimination.

"Today's decision sets these paired directives at odds," she said.

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Associated Press writer Katie Nelson in New Haven, Conn., contributed to this report.

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