In 1999, Tiffani Alvera was assaulted by her husband in their Oregon home so violently she ended up hospitalized. Her husband was arrested for the incident and Alvera succeeded in getting a restraining order against him. But the assault triggered an eviction notice from her landlord, who claimed Alvera’s call to police violated the landlord’s zero-tolerance policy for violence on the premises. Even after Alvera provided a copy of the restraining order to her property manager, Alvera’s landlord refused to remove her husband from the lease and ordered her to vacate the apartment within 24 hours. Alvera filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal agency charged with enforcing fair housing laws. That complaint resulted in HUD recognizing for the first time that policies in place that subjected tenants like Alvera to eviction, while neutral on their face, were a form of gender discrimination, since women are statistically more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence and therefore disproportionally affected by these policies.

Since that decision, ten federal appeals courts have recognized “disparate impact” race and gender claims under the Fair Housing Act. Social science and legal research, meanwhile, has reinforced the link for women between intimate partner violence, poverty, and homelessness and shown that women of color are more likely to become victims of each. While an imperfect remedy, disparate impact claims have gone far in addressing the kind of entrenched “second-generation bias” described by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her 2013 dissent in Shelby County v. Holder that is out-of-reach by traditional claims of intentional gender or race discrimination. But none of that may matter to the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, who are considering a case that threatens to do for protections against housing discrimination what its infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder did for protections against voting discrimination: render them all but irrelevant.

It’s no secret that conservatives have been gunning for years to get the Roberts Court to take up a legal challenge to the Fair Housing Act (FHA), with the hope the conservative majority on the Court would gut another cornerstone piece of civil rights legislation like they did in 2013 to the Voting Rights Act. This term they finally get their chance in a case that challenges whether housing policies like those at issue in Alvera’s case, which appear to be fair on their face but have a discriminatory impact when implemented, violate the FHA. Under this “disparate impact theory,” discrimination (in this case, in the renting or selling of housing) doesn’t have to be explicitly racist or sexist to be illegal. Instead, lenders or landlords can act in a way that appears neutral on its face but has a discriminatory impact.

The case before the Roberts Court challenging the disparate impact theory of the FHA, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. the Inclusive Communities Project, involves a Texas state agency responsible for awarding low-income housing tax credits to developers. It turns out that a high percentage of those tax credits go to developers who own properties in impoverished, minority-majority neighborhoods, which fair housing activists claim has the effect of keeping the community racially segregated. Lenders and developers are urging the Roberts Court to strike the disparate impact standard, arguing that despite the fact that ten circuit courts and HUD recognize disparate impact claims, the language of the FHA itself does not. Furthermore, they argue, disparate impact claims unnecessarily impede legitimate business practices by substituting the government’s judgment for that of the private sectors.

Those are compelling arguments to make to the conservatives on the Roberts Court, who, not surprisingly, hate the whole idea of disparate impact claims. To them, the disparate impact theory belongs in the same category of so-called liberal mandates, like affirmative action, which they claim reinforce racist disparities by advancing quotas and similar requirements in the private sector. For example, before striking down in Shelby County v. Holder Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (the section of the landmark civil rights law that designates which parts of the country must clear changes to their voting rights laws with the federal government or in federal court before they can be enacted), Chief Justice John Roberts infamously declared that because Black people were able to vote in historic numbers—thanks to the protections afforded under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act—that portion of the law was no longer needed. Our country is effectively post-racial, said Justice Roberts in the opinion, arguing that “things have changed dramatically,” so there’s no need to keep voting rights protections in place.

It is easy to see the conservative majority following a similar logic here to defend facially neutral housing policies with discriminatory effects. For starters, the text of the FHA doesn’t expressly identify disparate impact claims, so there is a tempting statutory interpretation hook on which conservatives can hang their hats. Also, a handful of states, like Arkansas and Indiana, have laws that specifically prohibit housing discrimination against victims of intimate partner violence, and the federal Violence Against Women Act has some specific fair housing protections as well. That is all to say that similar to the inadequate patchwork of election protections in place prior to 2013 that gave the Roberts Court cover to gut the Voting Rights Act, an inadequate patchwork of remedies exist to combat some forms of housing discrimination against women to give the Roberts Court cover to gut the FHA.

Not all court observers are as pessimistic as I am about the FHA’s chances before the Roberts Court. At one point during oral arguments, it appeared like Justice Antonin Scalia may have been riding to the FHA’s defense, arguing there was plenty of evidence that Congress intended the FHA to include disparate impact claims. But it will take more than the occasional, moderate quip from Scalia to convince me that the Supreme Court is going to side with people of color and women over traditionally white male property owners and developers. Chief Justice Roberts has during his entire tenure at the Supreme Court helped to roll back significant civil rights gains. There is every reason to believe he’ll do the same thing in this case.

A national survey of social service providers reported that approximately 30 percent of those providers had represented domestic violence victims who were either threatened with eviction or evicted due to the violence or noise in their homes, calls to the police, or physical damage to the property directly resulting from the violence. The American Civil Liberties Union, in its amicus brief in support of the FHA, notes that more than a third of advocates surveyed had worked with intimate partner violence victims who were denied housing for reasons directly related to domestic violence, dating violence, or stalking. Meanwhile, the New York Times just ran this piece on domestic violence, abusers escalating behavior, and the failure of law enforcement to take it seriously. I wonder if the justices read it?

A decision in the case is not expected until summer.