Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Policy, Enforcement, and Implementation

Unreachable Heights: Desuetude, Selective Enforcement, and an Arlington Heights Record of Purposeful Discrimination, 1886 to 2026

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
August 2026
Version
v1
Pages
31
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Abstract

American law has recognized since 1886 that a statute fair on its face may be administered with an evil eye and an unequal hand, and that unequal administration is itself a constitutional violation. That recognition has never been withdrawn. In 1967 a federal district court connected selective enforcement to the Yick Wo doctrine and to the desuetude literature, then dismissed the claim because the defendant had adduced not a scintilla of evidence that the government singled him out. The recognition and the proof problem were both on the record before anything that followed was built. What followed is this Article's subject. Washington v.\ Davis, Feeney, McCleskey, Armstrong, Sandoval, Iqbal, and Dukes each rest on separate ground. Together they make intent an element, place awareness of consequences outside it, disqualify aggregate proof, condition discovery on evidence only discovery can produce, close the route requiring no intent at all, and bar aggregation. Inclusive Communities preserved the surviving private route in 2015 and fitted it with the same instruments. Desuetude, which would have kept dormant rules from remaining available for selective revival, was declined. The Article does not present that sequence as an indictment. It assembles it as an Arlington Heights record, drawn from the Court's own published rationales, and runs the framework against it. The record fails, because Feeney places awareness of consequences outside the definition of purpose. The architecture is self-immunizing, and the showing is by construction rather than by assertion. Two claims follow. A standard provable only from the decisionmaker's own record measures documentation, not purpose. And because reaching internal records requires counsel, time, and the capacity to absorb delay, the remedy is rationed along the same axis as the injury. Five literatures document that pattern independently.

Keywords

  • civil rights
  • constitutional law
  • proof architecture
  • unreachable remedy
  • discriminatory intent
  • disparate impact
  • burden of proof
  • plausibility pleading
  • Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney
  • access to justice
  • disability rights
  • civil procedure

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Unreachable Heights: Desuetude, Selective Enforcement, and an Arlington Heights Record of Purposeful Discrimination, 1886 to 2026." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, August 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/unreachable-heights/

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SSRN version

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