More than one in six American employees provides care or assistance for an elderly or disabled family member or friend. Caregiving responsibilities cut across socioeconomic and demographic groups, although women and low-income individuals still assume a disproportionate share of such responsibilities. One in seven Americans is currently age 65 or…
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…
Among lawyers who represent employees in discrimination lawsuits, the most maligned rule of civil procedure is Rule 56, which governs summary judgment—a time-consuming, expensive, and frequently unfairly applied procedure in which judges decide cases on paper instead of allowing juries to hear the parties’ evidence. In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial…
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…
In a new case, Commonwealth v. Celester, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court emphasizes how important it is for defendants to be informed of and advised regarding their right to remain silent, holding that it was ineffective for an attorney not to advise his client to invoke his Fifth Amendment right…
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…
Massachusetts is one step closer to a strengthened equal pay law after the State Senate passed equal pay legislation in late January. The bill, which now goes to the House of Representatives for review, seeks to address the continuing wage gap between men and women. Although Massachusetts adopted its first-in-the-nation…
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…
Last week, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed H. 3944 (now H. 3947), An Act Relative to Substance Abuse, Treatment, Education and Prevention. The bill will, if passed, aim to curb the increasing numbers of opioid addictions and overdoses in Massachusetts. The House and the Senate, which passed a different…
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…