Those waiting for a decision in the hotly-anticipated Ricci v. DeStefano case will have to wait a few more days (likely Monday). The U.S. Supreme Court released the decisions for the day this morning and Ricci was not among them. It is now expected to be released early next week. It is one of just three cases remaining on the court’s docket.

In the meantime, Slate has published a lengthy piece today about the story "behind" the case.  It appears to be well-sourced and detailed and provides the type of insight you would expect from Slate. As the article states: 

The story behind Ricci is just one example of an entrenched conflict over municipal hiring that extends back in time and across the country. For at least two generations, competition for jobs in many cities has been framed as a battle between one ethnic or racial group and another over who is an insider and who is an outsider. Black firefighters first brought a suit over discrimination in New Haven in 1973. They won. So did minority firefighters who sued Cleveland, Birmingham, St. Louis, New York City, Newark, Bridgeport, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Massachusetts (statewide), San Francisco, Baltimore, and Minneapolis, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

But those victories all came in the 1970s. More recently, white firefighters have begun to fight back in court. Frank Ricci’s case isn’t the first reverse discrimination suit in a fire department. In 2001, four white men sued the Boston Fire Department for hiring minority candidates who had scored lower than the plaintiffs on a civil-service exam. They were the first to challenge the Boston department’s affirmative-action policy since it had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989. In 2004, they won. Last year, a Los Angeles jury awarded two white fire captains $1.6 million in damages in a suit claiming that they had been punished more severely than a minority officer for participating in the same prank. The New Haven suit, meanwhile, has spurred a similar one by white firefighters, also over promotional exams and test scores, in nearby Bridgeport, Conn.