Education Law

“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.” 

“Moving the work to a place that has no expertise in, has no history in doing the same work for anyone on any issue in any school is a problem in the best of times, and in these — which are very far from the best of times — demonstrate why,” said Catherine Lhamon, executive director of The Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “Giving the Department of Justice jurisdiction over all of these issues, will only further weaponize the rights and only protect a select few of us, rather than all of us under the law.”

Catherine E. Lhamon, Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and Former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, delivered the distinguished keynote address at the 132nd commencement for UC Berkeley’s School of Education on Thursday, May 21, 2026.

Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office under both Biden and Obama, said she found the Epstein correspondence stunning. “When I saw that text in the Epstein files, my jaw dropped,” said Lhamon, who now leads UC Berkeley Law’s Edley Center on Law and Democracy. “It is very surprising to me to see the crass and dismissive terminology, as reported, from the White House about survivors of discrimination … and the ugliness of the explicit planning and strategizing and which of our kids in school our federal government disdains.”