Miltenberg: “Can New Guidelines Restore Due Process on College Campuses?,” The Weekly Standard

Nearly a year since her landmark decision to rescind the Obama administration’s controversial campus sexual assault rules, Betsy DeVos’s Education Department has a plan to replace them. … Title IX lawyer Andrew Miltenberg—who successfully defended the Columbia student accused by Emma Sulkowicz aka “Mattress Girl”—called the reported replacement rules “an amazing step in the right direction.” In another recent interview he’d described the hegemonic attitude toward sexual assault adjudication in higher education as deep-seated, emotionally informed, and nearly impossible to reverse. “It’s well intentioned,” he said Wednesday of the new rules we’d read about in the Times, “but there will a lot of debate between now and then as what actually becomes codified.” Plus, “Schools are going to have and going to exercise a lot of discretion in how they handle things,” he added: Interim measures, the procedure between the filing of a complaint and deciding of a case, would still be up to individual universities—where resistance will more than likely rage on. At least Wednesday’s story will help gauge how much pushback to expect, he added, wondering if it had been, “An accidental-on-purpose internal leak to see what the process is going to look like and what sort of response there’s going to be.”

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