I previously wrote about a Massachusetts federal district court decision that was groundbreaking because it tackled the question of whether a private university’s sexual misconduct investigation and disciplinary procedure was fundamentally fair, and concluded that it was not. Last week another local federal court weighed in on the college sexual…
Six months ago a judge in the federal district court in Massachusetts issued what many people who litigate cases surrounding college sexual assault adjudications consider the most comprehensive decision on the topic. In Doe v. Brandeis University, Judge Dennis Saylor denied Brandeis University’s motion to dismiss the complaint by its…
Students wrongfully disciplined for alleged sexual misconduct on campus have had a difficult time convincing federal courts to entertain lawsuits based on Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination in education. Although the Department of Education has used (some would say exceeded) its administrative authority under Title IX to…
The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, the state agency responsible for guiding public colleges in Massachusetts, has recently waded into the thorny underbrush of law, morality, politics, and public relations that is the current state of discourse around sexual assault on campus. An existing 2014 Board Resolution declared “zero tolerance”…
As explained in Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk’s forthcoming article, The Sex Bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) guidance documents about Title IX have shaped college and university sexual harassment and sexual assault policies by threatening the withdrawal of federal funding if the schools do…
If you or your child is accused of engaging in academic misconduct, you’ll get a crash course in how the college or university bureaucracy works to process these cases and sanction students. Before that happens, you should be aware of a few key points. #1: Academic misconduct is a big…
As we have covered before on this blog, courts have generally been inhospitable to Title IX claims by students accused of sexual misconduct on campus, often dismissing them in the early stages before the students have a chance to obtain evidence through discovery. The most common theory for a Title…
As far as we know, every college and university in the country has a student handbook or honor code that provides rules for how students must perform their work and the standards they are expected to meet. And as far as we know, at every college and university students are…
Over a year ago, I published a blog post describing the unfair processes used by many schools to deal with complaints of sexual assault and harassment, and compared it to the criminal justice system. As I wrote then, the Department of Education (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has placed…
A complex patchwork of federal laws, regulations, and both binding and non-binding “guidance” issued by federal agencies governs how colleges respond to allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault on campus. Compliance with these laws is often a challenge for colleges, which have to respond to the federal government’s increasingly…