Federal judge dismisses Trump admin’s lawsuit alleging Harvard violated Jewish, Israeli students' rights

A federal judge dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Harvard University on Thursday, ruling that the government had not shown an ongoing violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act involving Jewish and Israeli students.

Richard Stearns, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, said the lawsuit, filed in March, relied primarily on incidents from the 2023-24 academic year. Only three of the incidents cited occurred afterwards, in March 2025, he wrote.

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“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” he wrote.

Stearns also said federal law requires the government to first notify an institution of its failure to comply with Title VI and determine that voluntary compliance cannot be obtained before taking enforcement action. The administration issued such notice to Harvard on June 30, 2025, per the judge.

Stearns wrote that the lawsuit is “devoid of any factual allegations plausibly establishing that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance occurred after June 30, 2025.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a PragerU commentator and former Harvard student who sued the university over alleged antisemitism and later reached a settlement, told JNS that Stearns “previously ruled in our case that ‘Harvard failed its Jewish students.’”

“This dismissal represents a technicality, and I look forward to the Trump administration either appealing or embarking on the appropriate administrative funding termination process,” Kestenbaum said.

Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, stated that the ruling “would make it significantly more challenging for the Justice Department to win future civil rights cases, not just those involving antisemitism, by effectively raising the legal standard for enforcement.”

“Normally, when an administrative agency finds an institution out of compliance under Title VI, it is required to give that recipient a chance to fix the problem,” he said. “This ruling, if broadly adopted by the courts, would add an unprecedented higher bar: the government now has to prove not only that the institution refused to resolve the issue at hand in an agreement with the government but also that additional subsequent violations occurred.”

“This is a significant and troubling departure from how civil rights enforcement has long worked, and it should concern anyone who cares about accountability on antisemitism or any other form of discrimination,” Marcus said.

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