Do you know whether anyone has attempted to or is attempting to challenge title 9 on behalf of athletes that had their sports program cut as part of the university's efforts to comply with Title 9? I am a class action lawyer at a nationaly respected class action firm, that would be willing to help (even on a pro bono basis)with the litigation.
If you know how i can get involved or who to contact please post here and we will figure out how to contact each other directly.
I run for a school that had Indoor and Outdoor Mens Track cut along with a few other sports. I've been doing some research to challenge this or help promote reform with this outdated law. This article does a pretty good job of explaining the law and how to challenge it:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3994/is_200404/ai_n9352172/pg_2/?tag=content
;col1
The ACLU brough the suit against our school, I'm trying to get in contact with those lawyers first to understand why we were cut and then going from there
Get in touch with the UDel kids who just had their xc and t&f programs cut under the guise of title IX.
Good luck.
Why don't you try taking on Roe v. Wade or overturning Social Security while you're at it.
Might as well start your discovery process for this lawsuit by going to the football coach and the AD. Trim the football roster down and you're on your way to closer compliance with numbers.
A class action lawsuit was filed by the college wrestling federation-their version of ustfccc a few years ago. I would have to do some research in order to find out how it did.
Nevermind. Found the ruling here it is. Doesn't look good for another attempt.
Title IX Victory! Judge Dismisses Wrestlers' Lawsuit
June 13, 2003
by Nicole Casta, Government Relations Associate
A U.S. District Court judge recently dismissed a lawsuit filed by a coalition of wrestlers who argued that Title IX policies require "quotas" for female athletes and have resulted in discrimination against men.
Judge Emmet Sullivan dismissed National Wrestling Coaches Association v. United States Department of Education on June 11 on the grounds that the wrestlers failed to show that Title IX caused their teams to be dropped and that even if Title IX were to be altered, the wrestling teams would not be reinstated.
The court's opinion was supportive of Title IX, describing it as a landmark civil rights statute enacted to remedy discrimination against women and girls. It also affirmed that Title IX's policies provide schools with the flexibility to decide how to structure their athletics programs, and that equal opportunity is only one factor in these decisions.
"The court's decision undermines the claims that Title IX is responsible for to cuts in men's athletic programs," said NOW President Kim Gandy. "It confirms that the Bush Administration should not only maintain the law, but enforce it more strongly."
Women's rights advocates noted that although the ruling is a substantial victory for Title IX, it may not be the end of the battle: The wrestlers have 60 days to appeal the decision to the D.C. Circuit, which is equally divided pending the nomination of Miguel Estrada.
Isn't that a contradiction in terms to combine "nationally respected" with "class action firm"? If you do not like title 9 then write people in congress and organize a grass roots organization to get Title 9 repealed through the legislative process. Oh, I forgot, the class action law firms would then not get to extract millions of dollars in legal fees from the colleges they sue. You wrap yourself in the banner of helping some student who got cut, but you do much greater damage to the education system by saddling them with your fees, which hurt all students (and makes the lawyers rich). I don't buy your "pro bono" line, but even if true, you are then just faciltiating other law firms getting the fee money out of the colleges.
Neill Clark wrote:
Do you know whether anyone has attempted to or is attempting to challenge title 9 on behalf of athletes that had their sports program cut as part of the university's efforts to comply with Title 9? I am a class action lawyer at a nationaly respected class action firm, that would be willing to help (even on a pro bono basis)with the litigation.
If you know how i can get involved or who to contact please post here and we will figure out how to contact each other directly.
5/10
Try searching for Equity in Athletics vs. JMU. They just appeared before a U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond. Can't find a ruling, if it has been issued yet. They have lost all previous decisions.
Thanks everyone (except the guy who thinks i'm a troll and the lawyer hating guy). In any event, unfortunately, I now recall that previous efforts haven't succeeded. In any event, that doesn't necessarily mean that a new effort in a different jurisdiction under new theories won't work. Seems contrary to the intent of Title IX to provide opportunities for women by denying opportunities to men.
I have no interest in repealing Title IX or denying opportunities to female athletes. I just want Title IX implement in a way that doesn't discriminate or have a disparate impact on men. There has got to be a more fair and reasonable way to implement it.
Title IX is 8-0 at the federal appellate level, and the Supreme Court has denied cert twice. Have fun getting past that.
I'm an L2. If any attorney is seriously considering doing work for a university, I would love to help out as a research assistant. Please post contact information and I would forward a resume to work for free.
Thanks to the person who posted the law review article about Title IX. It appears that there indeed there are other ways to acheive compliance without cutting programs. Apparently cutting is the easy way out. Although it will be very hard to persuade a court to tell a university how to run its athletic deparment it seems to me that if there are reasonable less discriminatory alternatives ( assuming of course, that cutting a men';s program is discriminatory) available to show compliance with Title IX (e.g. showing a history of supporting and trying to grow female athletic participation ) , a university should be required to choose the less discriminitory alternative.
Again, I think trying to repeal Title IX is overeaching and counterproductive, we need to get schools to enforce it in a way that doesn't discriminate on the basis of gender.
I wonder if a court has ever order the university to increase female participation in order to acheive compliance? If so, then that would undercut the (we don't want to get involved in university affairs argument).
I'm not a "lawyer hating guy," I am a lawyer, I used to be a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Sometimes companies get sued in regular cases and deserve it, and the lawyers suing them are often people of high integrity. But in the cases where I defended companies in class action suits, I in each instance have been nauseated by the lack of sincerity of the class action lawyers. They did not actually care about the class or about changing the world, it was all about the massive fees they can get in a class suit. Of the thousands of lawyers I have known in the course of my practice, the only group that has consistently made me ashamed of my profession is the class action lawyers.
[quote]Neill Clark wrote:
Thanks everyone (except the guy who thinks i'm a troll and the lawyer hating guy).
Neill is a runner so I don't doubt his sincerity.
Lip Kitten wrote:
Neill is a runner so I don't doubt his sincerity.
+1
cougarrunner wrote:
I'm an L2. If any attorney is seriously considering doing work for a university, I would love to help out as a research assistant. Please post contact information and I would forward a resume to work for free.
The university here needs some help with landscaping.
Your L2 skills and resume are perfect for the job.
I stand corrected, I should have said "class action lawyer hating guy". I've actually been on the same side as lawyers from GDC (thier client like our client was sueing the same defendant),great lawyers and great firm.
Sorry that your experience with class action lawyers soured you on our bar.However, I'd expect a former GDC partner wouldn't so easily fall prey to the inductive reasoning fallacy.
Neill Clark wrote:
However, I'd expect a former GDC partner wouldn't so easily fall prey to the inductive reasoning fallacy.
Neill, there's a valid point that he made. You missed it, because you'd much prefer that he made some logical fallacy.
In his experience as an attorney, and mine as well, I have seen egregious examples of bad motivation and questionable ethics by Plaintiffs' class action attorneys. It is not every person who practices in that specialty, but it is clearly not just a few people.
I graduated from law school with an extremely favorable view of class action plaintiff practitioners. My experience with many people who actually do that work has been instructive. In 2011, that group is more populated with some of the least noble in our profession than it was ten years ago and much more than twenty five years ago, when I first noticed how that work attracted some undesirables.
Those whose motivations and character made them not well suited for regular legal work with regular clients and judges in their community who came to know them and their level of trustworthiness over time, gravitate toward class action work.
It's not everyone in that specialty, but it's a haven for the unscrupulous. Honest class action plaintiffs' attorneys see a lot of dishonesty around them in their peers and clients, or if not, have lost the ordinary ability to perceive it.
How about a class action to get women's football going? Before Title IX many said things like women can't run further than 800m. Now, no one, even women, are thinking women can play football. What a joke. If women are smart enough to be worried about football brain injuries, they can play flag football. You can buy some really nice flags with half the college football budget.
The point of Title IX was to give women the same opportunities as men; an extremely worthy goal. However, you can't say well women are too smart to ever take up a game as dangerous as football so we are going to let them have all sorts of better opportunities everywhere else. You might as well say men are too smart to waste their time with housework.
The vast majority of men and even male athletes don't want to play football either but the legacy of football prevents things from ever being fair. The only way things are going to be fair between men and women and at the same time be fair between football and other sports is if the football problem is divided in half. If the law said women must play a form of football, a couple of generations from now women's football will have taken off just like the rest of women's sports did in the 1970s.