Suing the Office for Civil Rights

Article here. Excerpt:

'The prospect of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) being sued has been much in the news lately. Talk began with an announcement from FIRE—on the fifth anniversary of the issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter—that it was soliciting an accused student to sue OCR. Attorney Andrew Miltenberg then filed two such suits, on behalf of an accused student from Colorado and a state legislator from Georgia.

In a break from the past, the Dear Colleague letter reinterpreted Title IX to grant the federal government authority to order colleges to enact specific disciplinary procedures for handling sexual assault (and sexual harassment) complaints filed by one student against another. Each of the changes ordered or strongly urged by the administration increased the likelihood of a guilty finding; the best-known change required colleges to use the lowest burden of proof, preponderance of evidence (50.01 percent), to determine guilt.
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Republicans control 34 of the nation’s 50 governorships; many of these states have been under GOP control for more than a decade. Every state’s higher-ed law is different, but all give at least some control (usually through appointment of trustees) to a governor. Any of these 34 state education boards would have had standing to challenge OCR’s new mandate. Yet none have—a reminder that campus due process has no constituency, and with the exception of Lamar Alexander and James Lankford, the Republican record on this issue is very poor.

Any lawsuit coordinated by FIRE—or the two Miltenberg lawsuits already filed—first will need to survive a challenge on standing that a university threatened by OCR would not face. But the “Dear Colleague” letter not only lowered the evidentiary standard, but also mandated the right of accuser to appeal, pressured colleges to accelerate their adjudication processes, and discouraged cross-examination. So for standing purposes, the likeliest case would involve a student—as in the recent cases at James Madison and George Mason—whose not-guilty finding got overturned on appeal.'