Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ. (1999) 526 U.S. 629 [119 S.Ct. 1661, 143 L.Ed.2d 839]

In Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ. (1999) 526 U.S. 629 [119 S.Ct. 1661, 143 L.Ed.2d 839], NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund asked Horvitz & Levy LLP to prepare a friend of the court brief on its behalf (and twenty-nine other civil rights organizations) in support of a mother whose daughter had been sexually harassed at school by a fellow fifth grader. The mother sought to hold the school accountable for its deliberate indifference to this peer hostile environment sexual harassment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities. The amicus curiae brief prepared by the firm relied on an interdisciplinary combination of case law, studies, academic research and news reports to argue that student-on-student sexual harassment has a direct and devastating impact on students' educational opportunities, and that by ignoring the harassment, schools themselves engage in discriminatory conduct in violation of Title IX.

The Court determined by a 5 to 4 vote that school districts can be held liable in civil damage actions under Title IX, for deliberately ignoring severe, pervasive and objectively offensive student-on-student sexual harassment. A point critical to the Court's decision was one emphasized in the firm's amicus brief: that a school district's liability was based on the school's "own decision to remain idle in the face of known student-on-student harassment in schools," rather than the student harasser's own discriminatory conduct.

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