Justices Hear Peer-Harassment Case

Legal question involves which federal laws are to be used to combat gender discrimination in education.

The U.S. Supreme Court is seeking to use a lawsuit over peer sexual harassment on a Massachusetts school bus to resolve an important legal issue about which federal laws are available to combat gender discrimination in education.

The question for the justices during much of the oral arguments today was whether they granted review of the right case to resolve that issue. Much of the hourlong arguments in Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee (Case No. 07-1125) were spent debating whether parents who sued a school district over their daughter’s harassment by another student could possibly win under a constitutional claim when they have already lost under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools and colleges.

The issue for the court is whether Title IX provides the exclusive remedy for sex-discrimination claims in education, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, ruled last year in the case, or whether alleged discrimination victims may also sue under a broader federal civil rights law known as Section 1983. That law, dating from the Reconstruction era, allows plaintiffs to sue individuals who violate their constitutional or statutory rights...