Latest 2 Cases: Parents for Privacy v. Barr (Civil Rights), Medina Tovar v. Zuchowski (Immigration Law)

How Much Worse Will Trump Become, and How Quickly?

NEIL H. BUCHANAN

Neil H. Buchanan, law professor and economist at UF Levin College of Law, contemplates the world in which we are likely to live if President Trump is reelected. Focusing in this column on the effects on government employees and contractors, Buchanan predicts that our society will be almost unimaginably worse a year from today and thereafter.

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Letting His Hair Down: Why a School District in Texas Is Wrong to Deprive a Male Student of an Education Because of the Length of His Hair

JOANNA L. GROSSMAN, KATHARINE BARTLETT

SMU Dedman School of Law professor Joanna L. Grossman and Duke law professor Katharine T. Bartlett explain why a public school district in Texas violated both the federal Constitution and Title IX by having (and enforcing) a hair-length policy for boys but not for girls. Grossman and Bartlett describe the facts of the case and the legal landscape for sex-specific dress and appearance policies before concluding that the school district’s decision to enforce the policy was not only poor judgment but illegal.

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Parents for Privacy v. Barr

Docket: 18-35708

Opinion Date: February 12, 2020

Judge: Tashima

Areas of Law: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Education Law

A policy that allows transgender students to use school bathroom and locker facilities that match their self-identified gender in the same manner that cisgender students utilize those facilities does not infringe Fourteenth Amendment privacy or parental rights or First Amendment free exercise rights, nor does it create actionable sex harassment under Title IX. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's dismissal of an action challenging an Oregon public school district's Student Safety Plan as violating the Constitution and numerous other laws. The Plan allowed transgender students to use school bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers that match their gender identity rather than the biological sex they were assigned at birth. The panel held that plaintiffs failed to state a federal claim upon which relief can be granted, and that the district court's carefully-crafted Student Safety Plan seeks to avoid discrimination and ensure the safety and well-being of transgender students. The panel held that there is no Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy to avoid all risk of intimate exposure to or by a transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth; a policy that treats all students equally does not discriminate based on sex in violation of Title IX, and the normal use of privacy facilities does not constitute actionable sexual harassment under Title IX just because a person is transgender; the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a fundamental parental right to determine the bathroom policies of the public schools to which parents may send their children, either independent of the parental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it; and the school district's policy is rationally related to a legitimate state purpose, and does not infringe plaintiffs' First Amendment free exercise rights because it does not target religious conduct.

Medina Tovar v. Zuchowski

Docket: 18-35072

Opinion Date: February 12, 2020

Judge: N. R. Smith

Areas of Law: Immigration Law

The Ninth Circuit filed an amended opinion affirming the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of government defendants in a case involving when a spousal relationship must exist for a spouse to be eligible for derivative U-visa status. The panel deferred to a regulation that the USCIS adopted, which construed the statutory phrase, "accompanying, or following to join" to require that a spouse's qualifying relationship exist at the time of the filing of the initial U-visa petition. In this case, petitioner entered the United States and was a victim of a serious crime. After she was helpful to law enforcement and granted a petition for a U-visa, she sought derivative U-visa status for her husband. The panel applied Chevron deference to the USCIS's interpretation of the statute in enacting the regulation, holding that the statute is ambiguous as to "accompany, or following to join," the USCIS reasonably interpreted the ambiguous phrase, and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment has not been violated.