The legal saga surrounding the 2024 Title IX Regulations reached a new peak earlier this month. On January 9, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in Tennessee v. Cardona, one of the cases challenging the 2024 Title IX Regulations. In doing so, the court vacated the 2024 Title IX regulations nationwide.
It has been two months since the August 1, 2024, implementation date for the 2024 Title IX regulations promulgated by the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”), and schools across the country still face uncertainty from the court cases challenging the regulations.
Since their publication, the new regulations have faced strong opposition by states and national
Last Updated: August 20, 2024.
On April 19, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) released the long-awaited Final Rule to Title IX. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a statute with corresponding regulations that protect people from being excluded, denied benefits, or subject to discrimination under any education program or activity “on the basis of sex.” These regulations apply to every school at the K-12 and postsecondary level that receives federal financial assistance.
In 2022, state and local governments banned 2,571 different books. This is more books than were subject to such bans in the previous three years combined (2,436). Most of these efforts are taken at the local level. Texas’ Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act marked a departure from this practice and sought to ban books statewide. However, the United States Court of Appeals for Fifth Circuit (the “Fifth Circuit”) recently upheld a preliminary injunction against portions of Texas’ law.
Husch Blackwell’s Joe Diedrich appeared recently on the Institute for Justice’s Short Circuit podcast to provide analysis in connection with the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Biggs v. Chicago Board of Ed. The appellate court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in the case below, a dispute between a fired elementary school’s interim principal and the Chicago Public Schools system.
Key Points
On June 30, 2020, the Supreme Court, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, ruled that states must allow religious schools to participate in programs that provide scholarships to students attending private schools.
Background of Espinoza Case
The Montana Legislature established a program that granted tax credits to people who donated to organizations that award scholarships for private school tuition. However, the Montana Constitution contains a “no-aid provision” that prohibits government aid to flow to any school “controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination.” To reconcile the program with this state constitutional provision, the Montana Department of Revenue (“Department”) promulgated a rule that prohibited families from using tax credit program scholarship money at religious schools. When the Department’s rule prevented three mothers from using the scholarship money at Christian schools, they sued the Department and alleged that the Rule discriminated on the basis of their religious views and the religious nature of the schools they had chosen. The Montana Supreme Court held that the tax credit scholarship program, without the rule, violated Montana’s no-aid provision and invalidated the program entirely.
Title VI Obligations
School districts have an obligation under Title VI not to discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin. They cannot intentionally discriminate – that is, for example, treat African-American students differently than white students on the basis of race – or engage in practices that have a disparate impact on
On May 16, 2019, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an anti-affirmative action group, filed yet another lawsuit against the University of Texas at Austin (the University). This is the third such suit SFFA has filed against the University. The new lawsuit alleges the University violates the Equal Rights Amendment of the Texas Constitution by considering race in the admissions process. A similar lawsuit between the parties was dismissed in April due to a lack of standing.
Texas passed a law in 1997 known as the “Top Ten Percent Plan” (TTPP) which requires public state universities to admit all applicants from Texas who rank in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. This law was modified in 2009 for the University to allow for automatic admission of 75% of the incoming freshman class, with the remaining 25% to be chosen based on admissions criteria. Currently, students in the top 6% of their graduating class are eligible for automatic admission at the University in this 75% group.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether a federal law prohibiting employers from discriminating because of sex also protects LGBTQ individuals.
Background of Pending Cases
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against an individual “because of” that individual’s “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” In two consolidated cases—Bostock v. Clayton County and Zarda v. Altitude Express—the Court will decide whether Title VII’s ban on “sex” discrimination also prohibits employment discrimination based on an individual’s sexual orientation. And in a third case—R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC—the Court will decide whether the sex discrimination ban also prohibits discrimination based on an individual’s status as transgender. All three cases will be argued on October 8, 2019.