This is a civil rights case brought by an Oklahoma middle school student subjected to three sexual assaults by his male peers in an 18-month period, almost daily verbal harassment and bullying, and threats of physical harm and death in Washington Public Schools that went unchecked by officials with authority to stop it. Central to…
Public Justice joined an amici brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, then later to the Fourth Circuit, in a lawsuit brought by Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy challenging his Virginia high school’s bathroom policy, which bars transgender students from communal restrooms and forces them to use separate, single-stall bathrooms. The case presented the question of…
Public Justice joined an amici brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in this Title IX damages action against a university for acting with deliberate indifference to student-on-student sexual violence. Six states filed an amici brief arguing that all states and state entities—including state universities—have sovereign immunity from private damages actions…
We represent Kamaria Downs, a graduate of South Carolina’s Claflin University, who was forced by university officials to vacate her dormitory and move off campus during her senior year because she was pregnant. The university had a policy that prohibited that prohibited pregnant students from living on campus after their first trimester. It also required…
This was a Title IX sex discrimination lawsuit on behalf of Dallas Richards, who stopped attending a public high school in Williamson County, Tennessee, because school officials failed to take appropriate steps to protect her from sexual harassment by a male student. In 2013, while Ms. Richards was a senior at Independence High School, she was…
This case arose from the sexual harassment and assault of a 14-year-old female student in an Alabama public school. The girl was raped by a male student in a school bathroom after the school used her as bait in a plan to catch the known sexual harasser. Under school policy, a student could not be…
This federal civil rights lawsuit was filed by Lisa Shively on behalf of her daughter, T.S., a 17-year old Jewish girl who stopped attending public school in Northeast Ohio after enduring over four years of anti-Semitic and gender-based harassment with virtually no intervention by school officials. T.S. was one of the few Jewish students in…