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Fifth Circuit rules LSU must face Title IX lawsuit after student hazing death
June 8, 2020The Fifth Court has ruled that Louisiana State University (LSU) must face a lawsuit brought by the parents of a student who died due to a fraternity hazing event. The court ruled that by accepting funding under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the university waived its Eleventh Amendment immunity to sex discrimination lawsuits. The Fifth Circuit rejected the defendant’s argument that a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision represented an “unequivocal” change in the law that would enable a panel to overturn circuit precedent. (Gruver v. La. Bd. Supervisors La. State Univ. Agric. & Mech. Coll., 2020 WL 2374595 (5th Cir. May 12, 2020).)
LSU student Maxwell Gruver died after allegedly participating in fraternity hazing and being forced to consume alcohol. His parents sued the school under Title IX and state law, alleging that the school discriminated against male students by “policing hazing in fraternities more leniently than hazing in sororities.” The district court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the Title IX claim, holding that the plaintiffs had met their pleading burden and that the defendant had waived Eleventh Amendment immunity under Pederson v. Louisiana State University (213 F.3d 858 (5th Cir. 2000)). The defendant filed an interlocutory appeal of the denial of immunity.
The Fifth Circuit noted that although the Eleventh Amendment protects states from private lawsuits, states can waive that immunity, and Congress may make such waiver a condition of accepting federal funds. In Pederson—citing the Civil Rights Remedies Equalization Act—the Fifth Circuit ruled that Congress validly conditioned the receipt of Title IX funds on the waiver of immunity. Every circuit court to have addressed this question has reached the same conclusion.
The defendant challenged this precedent and the Fifth Circuit’s analysis of conditional-spending immunity waivers. Under South Dakota v. Dole (483 U.S. 203 (1987)), Congress can use its spending clause power to “entice states to implement its policy objectives, even if it could not impose those policies directly through legislation.” When a state accepts federal funds, it must meet conditions attached to those funds if a five-part test is met: The funds benefit the general welfare, the attached conditions are unambiguous, the conditions are reasonably related to the federal grant, the conditions and the grant do not violate the constitution, and the grant and conditions do not “amount to coercion as opposed to encouragement.”
The defendant argued that the analysis in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (567 U.S. 519 (2012)) demonstrated that Pederson violated the fifth Dole condition prohibiting coercion. In National Federation, the Supreme Court held that Congress’s threat to withhold Medicaid funding from states that did not expand the program under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was unconstitutional. LSU argued that this decision established two situations when conditions become coercive—when Congress attaches conditions that “do not . . . govern the use of the funds” and when Congress “surprises” states with post-acceptance conditions—and claimed that both situations were at play in this case.
The court rejected these assertions. It characterized the defendant’s first argument as a “misread[ing]” of National Federation, which used the phrase “govern the use of the funds” to delineate between types of spending, not to describe a coercive condition. Although the relevant waiver condition was enacted more than a decade after Title IX, the court found it was not “new or surprising in the same way” as the Medicaid expansion at issue in National Federation, which resembled the “creation of a brand-new legislative program.” In addition, the court wrote, the Title IX waiver condition has existed for more than 30 years without the defendant’s objection—in contrast to the parties that challenged the ACA the “day it became law.”
As a result, the court concluded that National Federation did not “unequivocally alter Dole’s conditional-spending analysis,” meaning Pederson remained valid. The court affirmed, allowing the Gruvers’ lawsuit to move forward.
