Janet Halley

The federal government’s broadening interpretations of Title IX, the 1972 anti-sexual discrimination statute that applies to educational institutions, has raised concerns that the freedom of Catholic colleges and universities to teach and govern themselves according to the Church’s teachings on sexuality is at risk. At least five Catholic educational institutions are among a wave of Christian colleges and universities that have applied for Title IX exemptions, in the wake of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ expansion of Title IX’s interpretation to include “discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”...Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, told the Register that the improper application of Title IX does pose a threat to academic freedom on campuses and that “these problems are emerging all over the country.” “There is plenty of evidence that Title IX is being expanded in application, way beyond its proper legal scope,” she said. Halley explained this has happened in several steps. First, the OCR issued “non-binding advice documents” that do not have the status of legal regulation, but “massively expand the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment.” “This creates a lot of confusion about what sexual harassment actually is,” she said.

In the latest development of a heated publicity battle, filmmakers of a popular documentary that criticizes Harvard Law School’s handling of a sexual assault case penned an op-ed for the Huffington Post sharply rebuking Law professors who have challenged the film...Law professors who have publicly challenged the film similarly took issue with the premise and title of the filmmakers’ op-ed. Janet E. Halley, one of the 19 professors who criticized the documentary in November, denied that she and the other professors were retaliating against or targeting Willingham and said the professors’ statements were critical of the film itself, not any individual student. “The reason I participated in the Law professors’ press release is not that a student came forward and complained about sexual assault, nor that she complained in the criminal process,” Halley said. “It is that ‘The Hunting Ground’ has profoundly misled the public about the ensuing processes which came out decisively against those claims.” Jeannie C. Suk, another professor who signed the public release, said her criticism of the film stemmed from concerns about fair sexual assault grievance processes, not retaliating against individual complainants. “There is this idea that we have to stand by and support or be silent about a film that does a very poor job of moving forward fair and effective policy or else be considered deniers of the problem,” Suk said. “That’s just a proposition that I don’t accept.”

The team of activists responsible for The Hunting Ground—a deeply irresponsible propaganda piece recently shortlisted by the Academy—are clearly desperate to quash legitimate criticism of their film; they recently implied that the 19 Harvard University Law professors who have denounced the film’s inaccuracies might be contributing to a “hostile climate” for Harvard Law students...Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard, called the filmmaker's comments "bizarre," in an email to Reason. "The press release and the website enable the public to gauge for itself the veracity of the film," wrote Halley. "This might have made a more unfriendly environment for the exaggerations, omissions, and falsehoods spread by the Hunting Ground. But here at the Law School we cherish debate and think that evidence matters—sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Legal counsel for a Harvard Law School student who was accused—but never found guilty in court—of sexually assaulting a fellow student and her friend have launched a website to publicly contest the portrayal of his case in the documentary film “The Hunting Ground.”...Janet E. Halley, one of the 19 Law School professors who denounced the film in the recent public letter, said restrictions from the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act limited Law professors’ involvement in “The Brandon Project” site. “There was very little that we could do because all the things that we know about the Harvard Law proceedings are covered...by FERPA and faculty confidentiality rules,” Halley said. Still, Halley praised the site and argued that viewers of the “The Hunting Ground” can now review allegations against Winston and compare them to court documents. Halley said she also placed the case documents in the Harvard Law School library for others to view. On Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences listed “The Hunting Ground” as one of 15 films shortlisted for nomination in the documentary feature award category.

It has long appeared in nearly every corner of the prestigious school. But now Harvard Law School’s official seal is under heavy scrutiny because it includes elements drawn from a slaveholding family’s crest. Following an outcry from students, officials from the school are examining the continued use of the seal, in what is the latest controversy over race and historic injustices on US college campuses in recent weeks. “Symbols are important,” Martha Minow, dean of the law school, said this week. “They become even more important when people care about them and focus on them.”

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has announced the creation of a committee to research if the school should continue to use its current shield. The shield is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall, whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard.

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

On Sunday night, CNN will air The Hunting Ground—a work of activist propaganda disguised as a documentary about sexual assault on American college campuses....Nineteen Harvard University law professors have denounced the film for (among other faults) misrepresenting the case of Harvard law student Brandon Winston, whose life was put on hold after a night of drunken, drug-fueled sexual contact resulted in his expulsion from the university and criminal charges. “What our student did is not the kind of violent, repeat sexual assault that the movie claims is both the nature of the problem nationwide and that each of the people in the film are an example of that,” said Elizabeth Batholet, one of the Harvard law professors speaking out about The Hunting Ground’s errors, in an interview with Reason. “That’s an amazing lie at the heart of a movie claiming to be a documentary.”...“Three good years of his life have gone solely to this,” said Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley, who also rejects The Hunting Ground’s narrative, in an interview with Reason. “It’s not right for the filmmakers to extend it out to yet another trial in the court of public opinion, when the underlying claims have been so conclusively rejected. It’s bad for the overall effort for justice, and it’s bad for this young man.”...“We who have spoken out at Harvard are completely committed to addressing sexual assault,” said Bartholet. “It’s horrible that this film is coming out that is now misrepresenting the nature of the problem and diverting attention away from how we can address it.”

The veracity of one of this year’s most talked about documentaries, “The Hunting Ground,” has been attacked by 19 Harvard Law School professors, who say the film’s portrayal of rape on college campus is distorted, specifically when it comes to their school’s handling of one particular case...“The documentary has created an important conversation about campus sexual assault,” said Diane L. Rosenfeld, a Harvard law lecturer who also appears in the film and did not sign the letter. “We need to be rolling up our sleeves and really figuring out what kind of preventative education programs to develop which create a culture of sexual respect.” But in their letter, the law professors, who include Laurence H. Tribe, Randall L. Kennedy and Jeannie C. Suk, said the film “provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student,” specifically a male Harvard law student whose case is included in “The Hunting Ground.”...“This is a young human being whose life has been mauled by this process for years, and now he has to walk around campus with people saying, ‘Oh, you’re a repeat sexual offender,’ and he’s not,” said Janet Halley, one of the letter’s authors. “It’s not a documentary. It’s propaganda."

A group of Harvard Law School professors have started a publicity campaign to challenge the depiction of the school’s sexual assault grievance process in "The Hunting Ground," a documentary film about campus sexual assault that CNN is scheduled to air on Nov. 19...Janet E. Halley, one of the Law School professors challenging “The Hunting Ground” and a signatory of the 2014 Globe letter, said the group will launch a website and upload documents about Winston’s case to further challenge the documentary. Halley argued that CNN’s decision to name Winston constituted “an attack” and that she and the other professors felt compelled to come to his defense.

Nineteen Harvard Law professors have written a letter condemning "The Hunting Ground," a film purporting to be a documentary about campus sexual assault. The film has been getting some Oscar buzz, and CNN is preparing to air the program next week. In a press package for the film, CNN singled out a story in the film about a sexual assault accusation at Harvard. The press packet named the accused student, even though he was not identified in the film. The 19 professors want to be sure viewers are aware that the film is highly misleading...The 19 professors include feminist icon Nancy Gertner; outspoken critics of campus rape hysteria Elizabeth Bartholet, Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk; as well as President Obama's former mentor Charles Ogletree.

Some students at Harvard Law School are demanding that the institution’s official seal be scrubbed of references to the slaveholder credited with its founding. The seal of the prestigious law school displays three sheaves of wheat, depicting the family crest of plantation owner Isaac Royall Jr., who bequeathed land to Harvard that funded a professorship in law and led to the school’s founding in 1817...The school, which adopted the seal in 1936, has long wrestled with how to handle its history. Harvard professor Janet Halley, a family law scholar who occupies the Royall Chair of Law, delved into the history in remarks she gave in 2006 at the time of her appointment, citing research by her colleague, Daniel R. Coquillette...“As the holder of the Royall Chair, I think it’s extremely important that we own the Royall legacy,” she said. “We ought to be responsible bearers of this legacy, and that means knowing about it first,” Ms. Halley told Law Blog. Mr. Coquillette, a legal historian who co-wrote a new book examining the school’s early history, agreed with her. “I understand why the students are upset, but this is just a fact of the school,” he said. “If we started renaming things and taking down monuments of people linked to slavery, you would start with Washington. You don’t want to hide your history. A great institution can tell the truth about itself.”

Students accused of violating Harvard’s sexual harassment policy may turn to attorneys as their personal advisers, and if they successfully appeal investigators’ decision in their case, a body of faculty and senior administrators will rehear it, according to a new document clarifying Harvard’s handling of complaints. On Monday, following heavy scrutiny, administrators with Harvard’s central Title IX office released a 10-page Frequently Asked Questions document offering more details about the University’s policy and procedures governing its response to sexual assault on campus...According to Jeannie C. Suk, a Law School professor and vocal critic of Harvard’s central Title IX framework, representatives from Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel in fall 2014 had indicated plans to release an FAQ document about the policies. Officials also consulted Law faculty members when crafting them, according to Karvonides. The guidance document released Monday seems responsive to many of Suk and her colleagues’ criticisms. “These FAQs show that the University can listen to reason on this sensitive and controversial topic,” said Janet E. Halley, a Law School professor who has led an effort at Harvard and across the country challenging what she argues is the federal government’s overzealous approach to Title IX compliance...“I think they have actually addressed the worst problems on the substantive policy side,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, one of 28 Law School faculty members who signed a letter slamming the policy last year in The Boston Globe. In particular, Bartholet praised the document’s clarification of the difference between “incapacitation” and “intoxication,” as well as its affirmation of protections for academic freedom.

Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment...But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad...Halley’s critique has reverberated — as the latest salvo in a long-running war, with deep intellectual roots, over how to grapple with rape and sex as a feminist. In the late 1970s, when Janet Halley was writing a dissertation on 17th-century poets like Donne and Milton, a young lawyer and political scholar named Catharine MacKinnon opened new possibilities for the women’s movement by conceiving the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus...."It’s tragic what the federal government has done," said Elizabeth Bartholet, a civil rights activist and professor at Harvard Law School. "They are creating a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for."..."When the case is ambiguous, when the memories are clouded by alcohol consumption or time, we shouldn’t be punishing people," said [Janet] Halley, a self-described feminist once responsible for investigating such accusations at Stanford University. "I’m afraid that’s what we are doing, we are over-correcting," Halley said. "The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due-process procedures."

Were it not for Harvard Law School professor Janet E. Halley, the national debate surrounding sexual assault on college campuses may well be in a markedly different place...Halley’s reaction to Harvard’s new sexual misconduct policy was not just disapproval; to the legal and feminist scholar, the issue at hand was more than just disgruntling bureaucratic decision making. Harvard’s—and the government’s—approach to adjudicating campus sexual harassment, Halley believes, represented an inconsolable breach from the principles of due process and an alarming example of some feminist principles taken too far.

Last July, Harvard could seemingly breathe a sigh of relief. The University had just unveiled a new policy and set of procedures intended to centralize and revamp its approach to handling sexual harassment and to ensure compliance with the anti-sex discrimination law Title IX...But within days, the sense of ease faded, once again, into months-long controversy, criticism, and debate....Elizabeth Bartholet, a Law School professor who signed the Globe letter, said she wishes Harvard had taken more of a leadership role against the federal government, which she claims is pressuring universities to lead investigation processes that deny due process rights to the accused...Janet E. Halley, one of the Law professors who signed the Globe letter and has played a leadership role in pushing for changes to the Law School’s Title IX procedures, also argued that engaging students is crucial. “We really need to be walking towards the students and saying, 'What is this really about?'” Halley said.

Virginia is one of many states that have proposed new legislation tackling sexual misconduct on college campuses. However, some people believe this new wave of enforcement is an overreaction to problems at hand. Harvard University law professor Janet Halley was one of more than a dozen professors who wrote an op-ed published in The Boston Globe arguing that Harvard Law School’s new policy designed to crack down on sexual assault was unfair.Halley spoke at Roanoke College on Thursday about the problems she sees with Harvard’s policy and similar policies that have been adopted at schools across the country in response to the attention that sexual assault on campus has received in recent years...Halley, a self-described feminist and progressive, said the policies at Harvard, which were designed to be tough on campus sexual assault, had several problems including giving victims more rights than the accused, a lack of due process and teaching women that they are weak and in need of protection.

A group of professors from the University of Pennsylvania Law School have added their voices to the debate about how best to ensure fairness as universities strive to respond to sexual violence. The open letter by 16 professors acknowledges that sexual assault is a serious concern, but criticizes revised procedures adopted by the university Feb. 1...“More and more people are seeing that there are competing interests and values … that need to be brought into the discussion,” says Janet Halley, a Harvard Law professor who was among those who signed a similar letter in October objecting to revised policies at Harvard University.