Expect the Title IX Inquisition
Tablet | KC JOHNSON
“The Biden administration’s new rules for adjudicating campus sexual misconduct allegations favor an ‘inquisitorial’ approach over procedural fairness.” The new rules “represent a further escalation in a policy and legal debate that has spanned more than a decade.”
Under proposed Biden rules, “accused students would lose the right to cross-examination entirely…They would even lose the right to a live hearing… [replacing with] at least two ‘meetings’ between the accused student and an investigator.” As for sharing evidence, ”the regulations would permit schools to have the investigator initially provide only a ‘written investigative report that accurately ‘summarizes’ the ‘relevant’ evidence.”
Relatedly, the a return of single investigator model in which one person from a university’sTitle IX office “serves the combined roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury in a criminal case” will create an “absence of checks and balances [that] is especially problematic in campus sexual assault adjudications, where colleges are often under enormous scrutiny and pressure…to reach a particular result.”
Plainly articulated in the new regulations, they “dubiously cite a handful of academic studies to maintain that an ‘inquisitorial’ approach ‘is more likely to produce the truth than adversarial methods like cross-examination.’”
Related
Proposed Title IX Regulations Raise Concerns Among Higher Education Experts (Crimson 7/2/22)
Sex Police (Common Sense, 6/27/22)
FIRE Petition: Title IX Regs Put Student Rights at Risk (FIRE, 6/23/22)
5 Ways Biden's New Title IX Rules Will Eviscerate Due Process on Campus (Reason, 6/23/22)
