By Scott Limmer
An attorneys blog about criminal law and procedure, college discipline, Title IX and cases of Interest
As other articles on this website demonstrate, male students have been placed at a disadvantage in recent years when they are accused of committing misconduct involving female students. Nobody thinks that men should be allowed to abuse women, but too many college administrators seem to think that Title IX requires them to bend over backwards […]
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As the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) notes in a footnote to its proposed new regulations for how schools handle Title IX complaints of sexual discrimination, including harassment or misconduct, more than 90 colleges have lost due-process challenges brought by students challenging school disciplinary actions. That means higher educators lose about half of the time […]
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A Baylor University administrator is being accused by anonymous critics of having insinuated himself into campus groups protesting the school’s handling of sexual assault claims, then using his position to pass on to school officials and others information on the groups’ protests and other plans. The charges first surfaced in the publication PRWeek in its […]
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Earlier this year, a federal magistrate judge in Harrisonburg, Virginia issued a decision recommending that state college James Madison University (JMU) pay almost $850,000 in attorneys’ fees and court costs to the pseudonymous “John Doe,” a student whom the school wrongly punished for an assault which a Title IX tribunal a year earlier had declined […]
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On Wall Street, at the Oscars or Grammy awards, even on Capitol Hill or at the White House, sexual harassment and sexual assault seem nearly omnipresent subjects. As a criminal defense lawyer, I’ve seen many cases – both in the settings of a criminal or juvenile court, and even more often in non-judicial settings such […]
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According to a new report by the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL), university students accused in campus hearings of sexual misconduct are “deprived of their fundamental fairness,” and procedures set by colleges and universities in response to a legal mandate enforced by the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) are in […]
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Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made it official on September 7: her agency plans to change guidelines the Obama administration had set in 2011 for how schools should investigate and handle complaints of sexual misconduct. In a speech delivered at George Mason University, the head of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) said the Obama […]
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A recent University of Virginia (UVA) law graduate’s new lawsuit attacks the procedural standards for dealing with sexual misconduct cases the Department of Education (DOE) mandates for the nation’s colleges and universities. If successful, the lawsuit could Title IX enforcers to back off their aggressive readings of the specific procedures colleges and universities must use […]
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New York Universities Must Report Sex Offenses in College Transcripts Virginia and New York in 2015 became the first states to require academic transcripts from their colleges to show whether a student has been disciplined for sexual assault, but other states have considered following suit, and some members of Congress support a federal law to […]
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The National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA) stirred controversy last year by publishing advice from a prominent law firm on ways colleges and universities can protect themselves against increasingly numerous and complex lawsuits filed by students involved in campus sexual misconduct hearings. The 18-page article, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A […]
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