How a Prominent Legal Group Could Change the Way Colleges Handle Rape

By Sarah Brown
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published December 4, 2015

The American Law Institute, a scholarly group influential in legal circles, is beginning to craft guidelines on campus sexual assault that will seek to outline best practices and bring some clarity to the tangles of compliance with federal law.

The institute is perhaps best known for its Model Penal Code, which is the bedrock of many states' criminal statutes, including sexual-assault laws. A team at the institute is now revising the sexual-violence provisions of the penal code.

The campus-rape project, on the other hand, will involve developing "guiding principles" for college officials, courts, and legislatures to use as a resource, said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a clinical professor of law and executive vice president for university life at Columbia University.

She and Vicki C. Jackson, a law professor at Harvard University, are the two primary authors of a framework that has just begun to take shape. Several principles that are part of a preliminary draft were discussed last month at the project's first official meeting.

'The attention to this issue in the last several years has put a spotlight on the need for processes that respond fairly and effectively to the complaints that come in.' The principles will cover reporting, interim measures designed to help alleged victims, relations between campus and law-enforcement officials, and the adjudication of cases. "The attention to this issue in the last several years has put a spotlight on the need for processes that respond fairly and effectively to the complaints that come in," Ms. Goldberg said.

The entire article is here.

Dealing With the Depressed or Dangerous

SAN FRANCISCO — How far can colleges go to stop students who are threatening to commit suicide?

It’s a fundamental question for college and university officials who work in the fields of student affairs, counseling and mental health -- and for the lawyers who may have to deal with the aftermath, and sometimes see mental health issues as a minefield of potential litigation.

At a session Tuesday here at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Attorneys, experts in legal affairs and mental health urged colleges to do all they can to get students who are threatening to harm themselves into treatment, or to get them off campus if the situation continues to deteriorate.

In the past decade, the number of college students with severe mental health issues has climbed. The development is often attributed to better early intervention and psychiatric drugs that enable students to function normally and attend college who wouldn’t have been able to do so in the past. “That’s a wonderful thing,” said Paul Lannon, an outside lawyer for several New England colleges who moderated the session.

But the increase has also been accompanied by several high-profile lawsuits, and the conclusion colleges and universities draw from those could be “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

After a Massachusetts Institute of Technology sophomore, Elizabeth Shin, committed suicide by setting her dorm room on fire in 2000, her family sued MIT for $28 million. They argued that the university’s counseling system failed Shin, who had a documented history of depression and threats before she killed herself. The suit was eventually settled confidentially.

In 2006, Jordan Nott, a former student, sued George Washington University, claiming that he had been forced to withdraw from the university after seeking help for depression. Nott also reached a confidential settlement.

The federal government has intervened in some similar cases through complaints students filed with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which has come out against universities who force students to leave campus because of mental illness, including a case at Bluffton University, in Ohio, in 2004.

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The entire story can be found here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this article.