By Scott Limmer
An attorneys blog about criminal law and procedure, college discipline, Title IX and cases of Interest
The Federal Commission on School Safety, created after the mass shooting last February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which former student Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff members, issued its report on December 18. Among the Commission’s nearly 100 recommendations was eliminating “guidance” statements made jointly by the Obama […]
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A federal appeals court stopped short of halting the activities of the University of Michigan’s Bias Response Team (BRT), but suggested such campus organizations might be unlawfully curbing students’ privileges, and instigating free speech rights violations. Last year, Speech First, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., sued the university in federal court, claiming it […]
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UPDATE: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has rescinded the Obama era school discipline policy on December 21, 2018. The Federal Commission on School Safety, created after the mass shooting last February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which former student Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff members, issued its report on […]
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For most high school students, attending college is an American experience to which they greatly look forward. We’ve all seen it in movies – college is the place where you get to live away from your parents, make a lot of great new friends, join clubs, teams, fraternities/sororities, go to a lot of amazing parties, […]
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School Discipline in the Past Over my years as a criminal defense attorney, I often get calls to represent students at high-school disciplinary hearings. When I first started practicing in 1998 most of those hearings stemmed from one or more of three main factors: drugs, weapons or fights. However, challenging it might be to defend […]
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I recently wrote about “The Reid Technique,” an interrogation methodology taught to over a half million law enforcement and security employees, including those in the CIA, the DEA, and every U.S. military branch. I noted it’s now being taught to groups of secondary school administrators in New York and elsewhere. In this post, I’ll outline a case I […]
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As often happens among young collegians, 19-year-old Jack Worth, a sophomore at Emerson College in Boston, found himself short of ready cash this January. Then inspiration struck, and Worth turned to the residence-sharing website Airbnb.com, where he posted an invitation for visitors to the city to take advantage of a “private, single-bedroom” at a central […]
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Previous articles 1 & 2 have spelled out why college or graduate schools often do a seriously bad job handling investigations, hearings and decisions on disciplinary charges against students. They’ve detailed how students are often denied due process in many campus disciplinary hearings that, for example, forbid students from having legal representation during hearings, fail to […]
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The failure of schools to fairly handle student disciplinary proceedings is no longer a well-hidden secret, as recent court decisions are spelling out in some detail. Take, for instance, the decision handed down in July this year by a state court in California in the case of Doe v. Regents of the University of California, […]
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How’s this for a nightmare? You’re getting a post-secondary education at a public college or grad school, doing well enough in your studies, in which you have invested years of your time and from which you have accumulated tens of thousands of dollars or more in student debt. Then one day, out of the blue, […]
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