Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

“The federal government has chosen to close its eyes to that way of understanding discrimination,” said Catherine Lhamon, executive director of The Edley Center on Law & Democracy.

Jonathan D. Glater, a professor at University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said the administration’s interpretation of the reach of SFFA suggests it may find grounds to pursue a lawsuit. Glater pointed to a February 2025 Dear Colleague letter in which the Education Department argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling applies beyond admissions.

“I’m glad that the Office for Civil Rights did still collect the data and did still clean it up and publish it for data scientists,” said Catherine Lhamon. “But it didn’t make it usable for somebody’s mom to be able to see what’s happening in a school community, advocate with a school board, compare the school community experience to another district or other states in the country.”

Dean Erwin Chemerisky weighs in on West Virginia v. B.P.J. upholding a West Virginia law prohibiting transgender girls and women from participating in sports corresponding to their gender identity.

Professors Khiara M. Bridges and David Oppenheimer weigh in on a suit brought against the City of Chula Vista by Roxana Kennedy, the city’s longtime police chief who alleges that city leaders secretly conspired to oust her.

Edley Center senior fellow Seth Galanter comments on the department’s decision to abandon the collection of key civil rights data on the nation’s LGBTQ+ students, cutting out data and definitions related to harassment, bullying and assaults.

“For the federal government to announce that it will no longer consider particular kinds of discrimination to violate the law, that guarantees that no person will experience that discrimination, is an incredible diminution of the long-standing protection that Congress has guaranteed to all of us,” said Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy.

“For the first time since 1964, the federal government is closing its eyes to some forms of discrimination, and that leaves more people more vulnerable,” said Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California-Berkeley Law School. “It’s unnecessary and incredibly ugly—it’s about closing a door on federal protection against harm.”

“This is a new way of doing business,” said Seth Galanter, an attorney who worked for OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at Berkeley Law. “There’s no nuance,” Galanter said. “There’s no inquiry into whether there’s a hostile environment. They say, ‘You have a policy, and the policy violated the law and yeah, you’re in trouble now.’ That is not something that prior administrations would have done.”

While the details of the interagency agreement are vague, director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy Catherine E. Lhamon said the shifts are sure to slow down civil rights claims. “An agreement to further slow down the work is unconscionable.”