Education Law Commons^™

It's Alright, Ma, It's Life And Life Only: Have Universities Been Meeting Their Legal Obligations To High-Risk Faculty During The Pandemic?, Gary J. Simson, Mark L. Jones, Cathren K. Page, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

Pepperdine Law Review

Even those universities most firmly committed to returning to in-person instruction in fall semester 2020 recognized that for health reasons some exceptions would need to be made. The CDC had identified two groups—people age sixty-five and over and people with certain medical conditions—as persons "at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19," and it had spelled out various special precautions they should take to avoid contracting the virus. Given the CDC's unique stature, universities very reasonably could have been expected to grant exceptions to faculty falling into either group, but that's not what many universities did. We argue that, properly …