Education Law Commons^™

Solidifying Students' Right To Gender Expression, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Policies Regulating Gender In Schools: Companion To Identity By Committee (2022), Scott Skinner-Thompson

Research Data

This document, Policies Regulating Gender in Schools: Companion to Identity by Committee (2022), https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K6iUkLnmDfaSVykyRaZ3Yqt7XNM9leGO-MQA6p2VbV4/edit?usp=Sharing, was published as an electronic supplement to the article, Scott Skinner-Thompson, Identity by Committee, 57 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 657 (2022), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1586.

A Taxonomy Of Silencing: The Law’S 100 Year Suppression Of The Tulsa Race Massacre, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

Over one hundred years have passed since the 1921 brutal massacre of Tulsa’s African American community. This notorious attack came at the hands of a white mob and with the government’s blessing. With numerous centennial commemorations behind us, what has been learned? The answer to this question is crucial to preventing similar atrocities in the future.

One lesson is how important it is to tell the story—to honor the voices of those who lived through one of the most infamous government-sanctioned racial attacks in U.S. history. Knowledge is power.

Another lesson is how pernicious the law can be in silencing …

Identity By Committee, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Even in school districts with relatively permissive approaches to defining and embodying gender, the identities of transgender and gender variant students are often governed by complex regulatory protocols. Ensuring that a student is able to live their gender at school can involve input from a host of purported stakeholders including medical providers, mental health professionals, school administrators, the student’s parents, and even the broader community. In essence, trans and gender variant students’ identities are governed by committee, which reduces students’ control over their lives, inhibits self-determination, constricts the scope of permissible gender identities, subjects them to incredible degrees of state …

Unsafe At Any Campus: Don't Let Colleges Become The Next Cruise Ships, Nursing Homes, And Food Processing Plants, Peter H. Huang, Debra S. Austin

Publications

The decision to educate our students via in-person or online learning environments while COVID-19 is unrestrained is a false choice, when the clear path to achieve our chief objective safely, the education of our students, can be done online. Our decision-making should be guided by the overriding principle that people matter more than money. We recognize that lost tuition revenue if students delay or defer education is an institutional concern, but we posit that many students and parents would prefer a safer online alternative to riskier in-person options, especially as we get closer to fall, and American death tolls rise. …

Keynote: The Protection Of Lgbt Youth, Craig Konnoth

Publications

This keynote contains three parts. Part I addresses the intersection of two metaphors: medicine and childhood in LGBT Rights. Part II addresses the state regulation of LGBT youth. Part III offers Professor Konnoth's concluding remarks on the protection of LGBT youth.

Taxpayers For Public Education V. Douglas County School District: The School Choice Movement Soldiers On, Bryce Carlson

University of Colorado Law Review

For nearly a decade, the school choice movement in Colorado has hung in the balance as the fate of the Douglas County School District Choice Scholarship Program worked its way through the courts, even reaching the United States Supreme Court in the process. The main issue at stake was whether Article IX, § 7 of the Colorado Constitution, which prevents public institutions from making any appropriation to a "church or sectarian society," barred students from using a school district scholarship to attend a private religiously affiliated school.

The Colorado Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the Choice Scholarship Program indeed …

The Economics Of American Higher Education In The New Gilded Age, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Arguing With The Building Inspector About Gender-Neutral Bathrooms, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

Conventional interpretations of building codes are among the greatest barriers to building the gender-neutral bathrooms of the future. Focusing on the example of schools, this Essay argues for a reinterpretation of the International Building Code in light of its policy goals: safe, private, and equitable access to public bathrooms. Under this reinterpretation, the Code allows all public bathrooms to be gender-neutral.

Rape Law Revisited, Aya Gruber

Publications

This essay introduces the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law Symposium, “Rape Law Revisited” (Vol. 13(2)). The Symposium features articles by Deborah Tuerkheimer, Kimberly Ferzan, David Bryden and Erica Madore, Bennett Capers, and Erin Collins. The symposium provides fresh perspectives on the issues surrounding sexual assault law and policy in today’s environment. The introduction notes that the current rape reform redux is not just a rehashing of old arguments, but boasts many new features. Today’s rape activism occurs in a moment when feminist ideas about coerced sex no longer exist at the margins — they govern and enjoy cultural acceptance, …

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

This essay, written for the Kansas Law Review Symposium on Campus Sexual Assault, critically analyzes “anti-rape culture” ― a set of empirical claims about rape’s prevalence, causes, and effects and a set of normative ideas about sex, gender, and institutional authority ― which has heralded a new era of discipline, in all senses of the word, on college campuses. In the past few years, publicity about the campus rape crisis has created widespread anxiety, despite the fact that incidents of sexual assault have generally declined and one-in-four-type statistics have been around for decades. The recent surge of interest is due …

Consent Confusion, Aya Gruber

Publications

The slogans are ubiquitous: “Only ‘Yes’ Means ‘Yes’”; “Got Consent?”; “Consent is Hot, Assault is Not!” Clear consent is the rule, but the meaning of sexual consent is far from clear. The current state of confusion is evident in the numerous competing views about what constitutes mental agreement (grudging acceptance or eager desire?) and what comprises performative consent (passive acquiescence or an enthusiastic “yes”?). This paper seeks to clear up the consent confusion. It charts the contours of the sexual consent framework, categorizes different definitions of affirmative consent, and critically describes arguments for and against affirmative consent. Today’s widespread uncertainty …

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

From Access To Success: Affirmative Action Outcomes In A Class-Based System, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Scholarly discussion about affirmative action policy has been dominated in the past ten years by debates over "mismatch theory'"--the claim that race-conscious affirmative action harms those it is intended to help by placing students who receive preferences among academically superior peers in environments where they will be overmatched and unable to compete. Despite serious empirical and theoretical challenges to this claim in academic circles, mismatch has become widely accepted outside those circles, so much so that the theory played prominently in Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas. This Article explores whether mismatch occurs in …

From Access To Success: Affirmative Action Outcomes In A Class-Based System, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

University of Colorado Law Review

Scholarly discussion about affirmative action policy has been dominated in the past ten years by debates over "mismatch theory'"--the claim that race-conscious affirmative action harms those it is intended to help by placing students who receive preferences among academically superior peers in environments where they will be overmatched and unable to compete. Despite serious empirical and theoretical challenges to this claim in academic circles, mismatch has become widely accepted outside those circles, so much so that the theory played prominently in Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas. This Article explores whether mismatch occurs in the …

Who May Hire Teachers: How Mutual Consent Fits Into The Current Colorado Hiring Framework, Amanda R. Levin

University of Colorado Law Review

In 2010, the Colorado General Assembly passed the Ensuring Quality Instruction through Education Effectiveness Act (S.B. 191). The law ties teachers' job security to the performance of their students, among other things, and changes the way that teachers and principals are evaluated. One crucial aspect of the law, and the subject of this Comment, is the mutual consent provision. This provision provides principals with the power to ensure the effectiveness of their teachers within their own schools by means of allowing them to oversee the hiring process of teachers. The mutual consent provision states that teachers can only be hired …

Considering Class: College Access And Diversity, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This …

"Of Greater Value Than The Gold Of Our Mountains": The Right To Education In Colorado's Nineteenth- Century Constitution, Tom I. Romero, Ii

University of Colorado Law Review

As the contemporary battle for educational opportunity has moved to state courts, the education clauses of a state's constitution have played prominent roles in the litigation. Of particular concern has been the role that history should play in interpreting the scope and meaning of various provisions of a clause. This Article advances this debate by examining the development of article IX (the education clause) in Colorado's 1876 "Centennial" Constitution. The Article first details the efforts to provide free public education in the United States in the decades leading to the drafting of the Colorado state constitution in 1876. Colorado, as …

Nepa, Climate Change, And Public Lands Decision Making, Mark Squillace, Alexander Hood

Publications

One of the most difficult challenges facing public land managers today is how to address climate change in a meaningful way when making decisions affecting public lands. This problem is largely the product of the high levels of uncertainty surrounding climate change and the potential consequences of climate change for the large and complex landscapes and ecosystems that public land agencies manage.

In February 2010, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued draft guidance to federal agencies describing how these agencies should address climate change in their decision documents. Recognizing the difficulty of the task, however, the CEQ’s draft guidance …

The Overhyped Path From Tinker To Morse: How The Student Speech Cases Show The Limits Of Supreme Court Decisions--For The Law And For The Litigants, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Each of the Supreme Court's high school student speech cases reflected the social angst of its era. In 1965's Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, three Iowa teens broke school rules to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. In 1983, amidst parental and political upset about youth exposure to sexuality in the media, Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser and Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier allowed the censorship of an innuendo-filled student government speech and a school newspaper article on teen pregnancy and parental divorce. In 2007, Morse v. Frederick paralleled the rise of reality television …

Imaginary Threats To Government's Expressive Interests, Helen Norton

Publications

The Supreme Court’s emerging government speech doctrine permits the government to refuse to allow other parties to join, and thus change or distort, its own message. In this way, the government speech doctrine appropriately protects government’s legitimate – and valuable – expressive interests by providing a defense to free speech clause claims by private speakers who seek to compel the government to deliver their own views. Too often, however, governmental bodies are asserting their own expressive interests to claim – and some courts are permitting them to exercise – the power to punish private parties’ speech that does not threaten …

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Education And Indoctrination In Public Schools, Jennifer S. Hendricks, Dawn Marie Howerton

Publications

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: "If You Don't Aim to Please, Don't Dress to Tease," and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer, Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 Tex.J. on CL. & CR. 1 (2008). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands. …

How Can The Rural Energy Poor Obtain Appropriate Sustainable Energy Technologies?, Michael Waggoner

Publications

Solutions to a current serious problem for the rural energy poor might best be found at least in part in older practices.

The problem comes from cooking over open fires, impairing the health of the cook and of others in her family, using fuel so inefficiently as to threaten forests, and releasing soot that contributes to global warming. Small, cheap, reliable cooking stoves could address these issues, improving health by reducing smoke and exhausting it through a chimney and thus away from the cook, using fuel more efficiently so that less needs to be gathered, and more completely burning the …

Disparate Impact Discrimination: The Limits Of Litigation, The Possibilities For Internal Compliance, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Students And Workers And Prisoners - Oh, My! A Cautionary Note About Excessive Institutional Tailoring Of First Amendment Doctrine, Scott A. Moss

Publications

First Amendment free speech doctrine has been called "institutionally oblivious" for ignoring how different institutions present different legal questions. This Article analyzes a little-discussed phenomenon in the growing literature about institutional context in constitutional law. With certain institutions, the situation is not institutional obliviousness but the opposite: extreme institutional tailoring of speech doctrine. The burden of proof ordinarily is on the government to justify speech restrictions, but in three institutions--public schools, workplaces, and prisons--courts allow heavy speech restrictions and defer to government officials. Even if these institutions need to restrict speech unusually often, why do we need different doctrine--institutionally tailored …

In Memoriam: Professor Edward J. Gac, Norton L. Steuben, Michael J. Waggoner, Wayne M. Gazur, Susan Morley, John T. (Jay) Ballantine

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Academic Freedom, Larry Alexander

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Three Versions Of Nonsense, Paul Campos

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Academic Freedom After Grutter: Getting Real About The "Four Freedoms" Of A University, J. Peter Byrne

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bureaucracy And Distrust: Germaneness And The Paradoxes Of The Academic Freedom Doctrine, Alan K. Chen

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.