GOOD NEWS: 7th Circuit’s Purdue Ruling Impacting Other Title IX Lawsuits
The case against Purdue University brought by a male student who was expelled and lost his Navy ROTC scholarship after the school determined he had sexually assaulted a female student has survived a second motion to dismiss. John Doe, the male student filed the lawsuit in 2017. He claimed Purdue violated his due process rights under the 14th Amendment and violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by reaching the “erroneous outcome,” solely because of his gender, that he had sexually assaulted his former girlfriend.
Along with Purdue University, the plaintiff included Purdue President Mitch Daniels, vice president of ethics and compliance Alysa Christmas Rollock, dean of students Katherine Sermersheim and the Purdue board of trustees as defendants. They successfully petitioned for the case to be dismissed, but the decision from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana was overturned in June 2019 by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. In its ruling in John Doe v. Purdue University, 928 F.3d 652 (7th Cir. 2019), the Chicago appellate court rejected the formulas other circuit courts used to evaluate Title IX claims and offered its own method.
The 7th Circuit’s opinion helped Doe overcome the motion to dismiss on remand and has enabled another male student, also identified as John Doe, to keep his own lawsuit alive against Purdue. In addition, a May 29 opinion from the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals used the 7th Circuit’s evaluation process in a similar Title IX lawsuit lodged by a male student. This is the first appellate court to adopt the Chicago panel’s method, according to Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson, who has studied and tracked Title IX lawsuits filed against institutions of higher education.
In using the 7th Circuit’s “straightforward pleading standard,” the 3rd Circuit panel said the standard “hews most closely to the test of Title IX.” Doe’s case was the first such Title IX lawsuit to reach the 7th Circuit. Complaints have been filed against colleges and universities across the United States primarily by male students claiming their schools found them guilty of sexual misconduct without giving them any chance to review the evidence or rebut the witnesses.
theindianalawyer.com-Marilyn Odendahl
