Is this the end of campus adjudications of “he said, she said” rape accusations in California?
According to a law professor at George Washington University, it could be, if schools take the initiative.
By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeals ruled that UCLA has no “special relationship” with a student that would justify liability on its part for the student’s on-campus stabbing by another student – known to have psychological problems – in a chemistry lab.
(Interestingly, the alleged attacker had a history of complaining that others made offensive remarks about him and even that a “female resident” in his dorm had made “unwelcomed [sic] verbal sexual advances” toward him.)
The majority’s finding that “a public university has no general duty to protect its students from the criminal acts of other students” could blow a hole in the legal rationale for requiring colleges to investigate sexual-misconduct claims, GWU Law Prof. John Banzhaf said.
In an email blast this weekend, Banzhaf said the majority’s reasoning applies with equal force to Title IX claims.
The appeals court absolved UCLA of liability “even if the university is on notice of the offender’s dangerous propensities, and even if the institution made numerous statements suggesting that it had programs designed to protect students,” he said.
By citing a 1991 ruling that absolved UCLA of responsibility for a sexual assault at a student party that served alcohol, the court was signaling that “today’s ruling applies generally to assaults of all kinds, including sexual assaults, such as date rape and acquaintance rape,” Banzhaf said.
The language of Title IX itself does not explicitly state that universities must investigate sexual-assault allegations, he said:
Thus if a college or university – especially one in California – simply followed this new ruling and announced that, because it has no duty to protect students from sexual assault, it would no longer investigate or take action on complaints of student-on-student sexual assault, it arguably would not be in violation of Title IX; provided it applied this hands-off policy uniformly, regardless of the gender of the complainant, and regardless of the gender of the accused.
Left unstated is whether colleges would take the risk of ignoring regulatory “guidance” from the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, potentially endangering their federal funding, though two Education officials have recently told Congress that its guidance is not legally binding.
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