The Supreme Court's decision in Board of Curators v Horowitz, 435 US 78 (1978) continues to have major implications for students facing academic progress dismissal and needing to challenge the academic dismissal through school administrative procedures. If you face academic progress dismissal or other school disciplinary charges threatening suspension or expulsion, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team for your strategic and effective representation. We help hundreds of students nationwide, in all programs and at all levels, defend and defeat academic progress and disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to tell us about your matter and to retain our skilled and experienced attorneys.
The Important Role of the Common Law
Paying attention to cases like the Supreme Court's Board of Curators v Horowitz case makes sense. Indeed, for our academic administrative attorneys, it is imperative for knowledgeable, skilled, and effective practice. A lot of education law is common law, drawn from a body of cases, and in some areas, all or mostly Supreme Court cases. The U.S. draws its legal tradition from old English common law, not from European continental civil code traditions. The common law proceeds democratically, authentically, and practically, from the bottom up, case by case. Civil code traditions proceed in the opposite direction, top-down, from abstract codes the nation's rulers adopt and impose over private parties below. Value the American common law tradition. It gives you the opportunity to proceed with the enforcement of your rights with our representation toward the goals you have chosen, drawing on a vast body of case law from which we can draw supporting rules and principles. We stay abreast of education case law for exactly that reason, to serve our education law clients well.
The Special Value of Supreme Court Case Law
So, case law can be critical to effective and strategic advocacy in a school administrative proceeding. Yet Supreme Court case law plays an especially prominent role in those school proceedings and, particularly in student rights and disciplinary matters. Supreme Court decisions generally address issues of great significance, first of all, given the Supreme Court's largely discretionary control over its docket. Second, Supreme Court cases often decide broad constitutional rights more so than narrow statutory issues. Supreme Court constitutional decisions can influence the outcomes in a wide range of cases across factual contexts. Third, Supreme Court cases control all lower federal courts and all courts deciding the constitutional or federal law issues that the Supreme Court has decided. Again, that's a lot of cases covering a wide range of issues. And finally, the Supreme Court takes extra deliberative care to produce the highest quality opinions, giving the greatest insight into education law and the other subjects it decides. Our attorneys thus pay very careful attention to the Supreme Court's education law decisions, like the Court's decision in Board of Curators v Horowitz.
The Facts of Board of Curators v Horowitz
A Supreme Court case's facts are also important, not just because they influence the outcome in the Supreme Court but also because they influence the reach and precedential effect of the decided case in other factually similar cases that come before school administrators and before the courts. If the facts in your school matter are somewhat like the facts in Board of Curators v Horowitz, then the Supreme Court's decision in that case is more likely to govern the decisions of school administrators in your school matter. If the facts of Horowitz are completely unlike the facts in your school matter, then your case will likely not present the same issue that Horowitz decided. In that instance, our attorneys will locate other controlling or advisory Supreme Court case law or case law from lower courts.
In Board of Curators v Horowitz, a public university medical school program dismissed a student in her final year. The student's dismissal followed a lengthy course of evaluations, reviews, expressions of concern, and ultimatums spanning the final two years of the student's medical program. In fact, the student's dismissal occurred late in her final year, during the entire course of which she had been on probation. Because the federal lawsuit that the student filed to challenge her dismissal raised and addressed the issue of the procedural fairness of her dismissal, the following details of the medical program's treatment of the student are of special interest:
- several of the medical program's professors expressed dissatisfaction with the student's clinical performance;
- a faculty-student council established to review student performance and recommend student advancement and graduation at various times recommended the student's probation and dismissal;
- the council advanced the student to her last year on probation;
- in the middle of that final year, the council recommended dismissing the student unless she showed radical improvement;
- the student appealed the council's recommendation to a panel of seven physicians who evaluated the student's examination performance in the middle of her final year;
- the appeal panel divided, with two physicians recommending graduation, two recommending dismissal, and three recommending no graduation but probation and additional education;
- the student failed to show improvement through the course of her final year, and the student's surgical rotations rating low satisfactory;
- the council again warned the student that radical improvement was necessary to graduate;
- when another rotation evaluation was negative, the council finally recommended dismissal before the final year's end;
- a special committee of professors and the medical program dean approved the recommendation for dismissal and
- the student appealed her dismissal to the university provost, who denied the appeal and confirmed the student's dismissal.
These facts may or may not be anything like your school issue. If you are a graduate or professional school student facing academic progress charges and potential dismissal, then the Horowitz facts may be sufficiently on point to control or influence your case. If, instead, your case involves academic dismissal charges from an undergraduate program, Horowitz may still be sufficiently on point to have considerable influence in your case. If your school matter involves behavioral misconduct charges rather than academic failure charges, then Horowitz is less likely to have significant influence over your case. This progressive analysis of equating case facts to case facts is how the common law proceeds. Our attorneys have the considerable education law knowledge and skills to identify the Supreme Court case law or other case law closest to your case on the facts, to serve as helpful or controlling authority for your best outcome in your school matter.
Procedural Posture of Board of Curators v Horowitz
A case's procedural posture also has considerable influence over whether the case will serve as controlling or advisory authority in your school matter. Procedural posture refers to how the matter got into, through, and out of the courts. In Board of Curators v Horowitz, the dismissed medical student filed suit against the involved medical program and university officials in the local federal district court. The district court conducted a full trial, after which it ruled that the medical school defendants had not violated the student's rights. The student appealed her case's dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The federal appellate court reversed the district court, holding in favor of the student and finding that the medical school defendants had violated the student's rights. The medical school defendants sought Supreme Court review. After briefing and argument, the Supreme Court reversed the federal appellate court, agreeing with the district court that the medical school defendants had not violated the student's rights.
This procedural posture means several things about the Horowitz case's precedential value. First, the student's choice to file her case in the federal system under federal law means that the case has precedential value only in federal cases or cases decided under the same federal law. The Horowitz decision would not control a state court case that the parties pursue and defend under only state law rather than federal law. Second, the fact that the case reached the Supreme Court indicates that the case's opinion will control all lower federal courts. Lower federal courts must generally follow Supreme Court rulings. Further, because the Horowitz case decided a federal law claim having to do with the obligations of public school officials, public school officials making similar decisions in subsequent matters should act in a manner consistent with the federal law obligations that the Horowitz opinion decided. Our attorneys know how to interpret and apply these rules of precedent for your best outcome in your school matter, drawing on the Horowitz case and other cases.
Legal Claims in Board of Curators v Horowitz
The legal claims and defenses that the parties choose and pursue in a case, on which the court rules in that case, also influence the case's precedential effect on subsequent undecided cases. In Board of Curators v Horowitz, the student sued the medical school defendants under a federal statute 42 USC Section 1983, supported by (1) a Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process claim and (2) a Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process claim. Consider this further detail as to the nature and outcome of those two claims.
Procedural Due Process Claim in Board of Curators v Horowitz
The Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause generally requires that state actors depriving a person of a constitutionally protected liberty or property interest must first afford the person fair notice of the grounds and a fair hearing before an impartial decision maker. In a bit of redundancy, the courts refer to these obligations as procedural due process. Because the medical school program in the Horowitz case was a public university program, the program and university officials who were the defendants in the student's case were state actors for purposes of the student's procedural due process claim. The Supreme Court further assumed, without deciding, that the student has a liberty or property interest in her medical education and the opportunity to pursue medical practice that the education afforded.
The Supreme Court reached a sticking point, though, on the student's claim that the involved medical school and university officials had not afforded the student a fundamentally fair procedure. You've seen above the lengthy course of back and forth that the medical school administration followed with the student to ensure that she knew she was in academic peril and had an opportunity to show the medical school that she should not suffer dismissal. The student claimed that the medical school and university had never afforded her an actual hearing, by which she meant a court-like, in-person meeting of all the involved parties and witnesses. That much was true. The school defendants hadn't conducted a hearing having that degree of formality. However, the Supreme Court ruled that for academic decisions, a professional school program need not do so, as long as it provided the student with a substantial opportunity to answer the academic concerns. The Supreme Court held that the school defendants had done so.
Substantive Due Process Claim in Board of Curators v Horowitz
Cases have separately construed the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to have a substantive element in addition to its procedural aspect. In an obvious oxymoron, courts refer to that substantive aspect of the Amendment's due process clause as substantive due process. A substantive due process claim asks the reviewing court to look at whether the defendants acted arbitrarily and capriciously to deny the plaintiff of a substantive right without logical and reasonable grounds. In Horowitz, the student's substantive right had to do with her pursuit of a medical degree and its concomitant opportunity to practice medicine.
Technically, the Horowitz Supreme Court did not reach the significant question of whether the student had a substantive right in her medical degree and practice opportunity. That hesitancy to recognize substantive due process claims characterizes Supreme Court law on the question. Lower federal courts are only somewhat more willing to entertain substantive due process claims, usually with the caveat that the Supreme Court has given them scant if any, authority to do so. Instead of reaching and deciding whether the student had a substantive right, the Supreme Court held that if she had such a right, the school defendants had clearly not violated it. For the student to argue that the school defendants had no rational basis on which to dismiss her, after all her failures to improve or inability to do so and low evaluations, and that the defendants instead acted arbitrarily, indeed seems preposterous on the district court's well-developed trial record.
Holdings of Board of Curators v Horowitz
Another way to understand a case and deploy its authority to control or influence the decision in new cases is to discern, advocate, and rely on the case's holding. A holding is not the case's procedural posture or reasoning. A holding is not the case's legal claims, facts, or outcome. A holding is all of those things together, condensed into a concise statement of law, rule, or principle useful to guide decisions in subsequent cases. Attorneys disagree over case holdings. So do judges. Judges may even purport to write their own case holdings into their case opinions, but in doing so, misconstrue case dicta, or unnecessary side notes and commentary, for the actual case holding. Our attorneys know how to discern and deploy Supreme Court case holdings and holdings from other authoritative or controlling cases.
One way of stating the holding in Board of Curators v Horowitz is that college and university officials, having greater discretion over how to provide due process to students in academic deficiency questions than they do in disciplinary misconduct matters, need not provide the deficient student with a formal hearing as long as the student can defend the student's academic performance in a reasonable alternative manner. Another way of stating the holding in Horowitz is that a student dismissed for academic deficiencies has no procedural due process claim against school officials who fail to offer the student a formal hearing as long as the officials give the student a reasonable alternative to justify the student's academic performance. We can apply these holdings and other holdings from other Supreme Court and lower court cases to advance your school matter to its best conclusion.
Quotes from Board of Curators v Horowitz
Another way that attorneys and judges draw from Supreme Court decisions, in addition to deploying case holdings, is to quote from case opinions. The quotes may not always have to do with the case's reasoning or outcome. The quotes may not always represent case holdings. The quotes may just be memorable, useful, or catchy things the Supreme Court justices wrote in the way that many justices and their premier law clerks have great talent in doing so. Useful quotes from Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion in Board of Curators v Horowitz include:
- “required was an ‘informal give-and-take' between the student and the administrative body ... that would, at least, give the student ‘the opportunity to characterize his conduct and put it in what he deems the proper context'” [435 US 86];
- “[t]he very nature of due process negates any concept of inflexible procedures universally applicable to every imaginable situation” [435 US 86];
- “there are distinct differences between decisions to suspend or dismiss a student for disciplinary purposes and similar actions taken for academic reasons which may call for hearings in connection with the former, but not the latter” [435 US 87];
- “dismissals for academic (as opposed to disciplinary) cause do not necessitate a hearing before the school's decision making body” [435 US 87];
- “A school is an academic institution, not a courtroom or administrative hearing room.” [435 US 88]; and
- “the determination whether to dismiss a student for academic reasons requires an expert evaluation of cumulative information and is not readily adapted to the procedural tools of judicial or administrative decision making” [435 US 90].
Impact of Board of Curators v Horowitz
The foregoing discussion of the Supreme Court's decision in Board of Curators v Horowitz is a lot to consider. Your question may simply be, how does Horowitz affect your case? While the effect of Horowitz on any particular case depends on a full understanding and analysis of the facts and circumstances of that case, we can suggest the following potential impacts of the Supreme Court's Horowitz decision. Retain us to learn what the actual effects of Horowitz and other Supreme Court cases are on your school matter and how we can deploy those cases for your best outcome. Horowitz may suggest the following potential impacts in school cases:
- college and university officials have greater discretion to shape academic deficiency procedures;
- college and university officials need not convene formal hearings in academic deficiency cases;
- college and university officials need only ensure that the student accused of academic deficiency have an opportunity to justify and explain their academic performance after learning of the alleged deficiencies;
- college and university officials have less discretion to shape procedures in disciplinary misconduct cases than they do in academic deficiency cases;
- in disciplinary misconduct cases, college and university officials generally should offer some form of hearing permitting the accused student to attend in person to directly address the charges; and
- graduate and professional school officials may have greater discretion than undergraduate program officials to shape academic deficiency procedures.
Premier Student Defense Attorneys Available
If you face school academic deficiency charges or disciplinary misconduct charges, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team for the strategic and skilled representation and effective advocacy you need. Do not retain an unqualified local criminal defense attorney or personal injury attorney. College and university administrative proceedings are unlike criminal and civil court cases, as the Board of Curators v Horowitz Supreme Court case clearly demonstrates. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to tell us about your case and to retain our highly qualified attorney services.
