The Politicization of Due Process in Title IX Campus Sexual Assault Regulation

• In Event: 1567 - Section on Sociology of Law Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 5: The State

Abstract

Title IX is a federal civil rights law on gender equality that has recently added new legal requirements that universities work to reduce sexual assault on college campuses. However, Title IX has been criticized by field actors like activists, compliance professionals, mental and physical health professionals, teachers, administrators, lawyers, lawmakers and survivors at the federal, state, and campus levels. In particular, legal values like due process in universities’ investigative procedures have become widely contested by different groups who either align with survivors’ rights, are concerned with rights of the accused, or who are invested in preserving managerial interests. This research looks at how field actors construct the meaning of due process at the University of California and in the broader organizational field of government offices and university organizations that regulate sexual violence on college campuses. The project contributes to major gaps in Title IX scholarship by bringing in neo-institutional literature on how social movements and organizations shape the meaning of the laws that are meant to regulate them, mediating the positive function of the law. This study combines multi-site analytic ethnographic approaches, focus group data, pilot study interview data, content analysis, and a legislative history of federal, state, and university laws and policies on Title IX in order to explain how field actors’ construction of the law leads to differential meanings of due process, impacting how survivors and the accused interface with the Title IX system.

Key words: Title IX, due process, campus sexual assault, law and organizations, social movements, legal endogeneity

Author

• Jessica Cabrera, UC Irvine