UNIVERSITIES NEED OUTSIDE, ADULT SUPERVISION: Second Circuit Wheels on Campus Justice, Likening It to a Star Chamber: Judge Cabranes warns of ‘miscarriages of justice’ in sexual harrassment cases that are ‘life and death for our great universities.’
In a decision that is set to strike American campuses like a thunderbolt, a trio of appellate judges in the Second Circuit handed professors and others accused of sexual harassment without due process the ability to turn to federal civil rights law as they seek to defend themselves.
In what is poised to become a classic defense of due process on campus, one of the judges, José Cabranes, thundered in a concurrence that a Cornell professor denied tenure on account of a sexual harassment allegation had faced a system that is the rough equivalent of an “English Star Chamber,” a notorious and unaccountable tribunal that once sat at Westminster.
Well, he’s right.