iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

12/ But, finally, I want to underscore (as I did below) the distinction between a university's legal exposure and its ethical/institutional imperatives. Universities should use the breathing space the law gives them to tackle that work thoughtfully, not to ignore it. (ssrn.com/abstract=627...)

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

9/ All of that is before we even get to the question of when a university can be liable for failing to *curb* qualifying peer harassment. On that issue, the Commission agrees courts "must defer to colleges’ decisions to err on the side of academic freedom" in policy & discipline.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

8/ Drawing on testimony by @genevievelakier.bsky.social & @dorfonlaw.bsky.social, the report distinguishes targeted abuse from chants, signs, & other speech addressed to the campus at large. In a university setting, the latter receives much greater 1st Amendment protection, even when very offensive.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

7/ The report also stresses that an actionable “hostile environment” is not simply an alienating campus climate. The standard is much more demanding: severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment, where "objective" offensiveness is informed by the First Amendment.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

6/ Namely, even if subjective intent weren't necessary, the protesters' message would at least need to be "demeaning of the protected class (i.e., people of Jewish ancestry) as such and not simply of ideas or institutions that [they] are more likely … to value."

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

4/ At the same time, anti-Zionism can be a pretext for anti-Jewish discrimination. Excluding “Zionists” by picking out people with Jewish-sounding names, for example, is ancestry discrimination. The report rightly acknowledges that this is a point of broad agreement too.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

3/ That distinction matters for Zionism. Rejecting claims of some, the report says my "reluctance to treat Zionism as a protected facet of Jewish ancestry appears to align with current law”; beliefs about who should govern a certain territory are distinct from anyone's ancestry.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

1/ The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just released its report on campus antisemitism and Title VI. I testified at the hearing. The report is unanimous, bipartisan, & debunks the main legal theories behind recent attacks on universities for allegedly tolerating antisemitism. 🧵

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

You can now listen to nearly all opinions in Case Viewer, with a text-to-speech algorithm tuned for legal content (notice how it compresses the U.S. cite). And it will keep playing from the background or lock screen with navigable sections, like a podcast. (Watch video with sound on.) caseviewer.app

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The brief explains why these lawsuits are foreclosed by both Title VI and the First Amendment. It also highlights some striking distortions in the govt's version of events at Harvard—like blatantly misquoting an email, & apparently defining opposition to speech restrictions as "anti-Israeli". (2/2)

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Case Viewer (@caseviewerapp.bsky.social) has a refreshed website and a bunch of post-semester refinements & enhancements. Here's how a couple of yesterday's SCOTUS opinions render on Mac and iPhone. Check it out at www.caseviewer.app! And if you need a discount code for full version, let me know.

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Yes—as reflected in Stearns's application of the MIT precedent in the Segev case a few months ago:

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

@CaseViewerApp.bsky.social is much more impressed with Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in the tariffs case than I am…

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Why anti-Zionism can't properly be treated as antisemitism for purposes of federal civil rights law, in ~ 2 minutes

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Update: I pointed out this tension with Trump DOJ guidance, and the EEOC Chair responded that it's "[e]mbarrassing that a Harvard Law professor has this degree of reading and listening comprehension issues." Ok then!

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Isn't this message from the EEOC blatantly unconstitutional under Trump DOJ guidance? A nice exhibit for any university challenged over targeted recruitment or the like! "Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim..."

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

And here are some of the slides, meant to capture what the hard question is, what I think the bottom line is, and why the IHRA definition, as it's been construed, is problematic:

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

The latest version of Case Viewer (www.caseviewer.app) includes a beta of an integrated chatbot that's pretty distinctive and genuinely useful (IMHO). It reads the case, answers directly based on the text, and scrolls you to the relevant passages. @caseviewerapp.bsky.social

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Based on the @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social's new reporting, Harvard's commitment to scrubbing discussion of race from the admissions process (left) appears to go far beyond what the conservative Supreme Court majority actually required in SFFA (right).

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

But the only mention of spitting in that part of the report is a complaint by a "Muslim woman who wears hijab." And there are no complaints of spitting anywhere else in the report either (though there's another mention of "spitting at pro-Palestinian demonstrators"). (2/3)

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

A stunning and telling error in the Title VI "notice of violation" against Harvard: One of the document's most striking claims is that Harvard ignored "reports of Jewish and Israeli students being spit on in the face for wearing a yarmulke." This is repeated in their letter & in news coverage.(1/3)

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Reading the Title VI "notice of violation" against Harvard makes stark that, to a large extent, the target is not antisemitism (not even trumped up claims of antisemitism) but protests. Where in these descriptions of alleged misconduct is the discrimination against Jewish (or Israeli) students?

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

There is much that's far-fetched and remarkable about Trump admin's new Title VI finding against Harvard. One example is this bizarre bit about why claims in Harvard's antisemitism report can be treated as evidence—despite the task force's explanation that it 'did not require ... evidence'! (1/2)

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

New paper: "Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Title VI: A Guide for the Perplexed" — with @hellmandeborah.bsky.social. Forthcoming in Harv L Rev Forum (ssrn.com/abstract=5271044) This is one of the first systematic analyses of the wave of Title VI claims over campus antisemitism. A quick summary 🧵:

ANTISEMITISM, ANTI-ZIONISM, AND TITLE VI:

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

Benjamin Eidelson & Deborah Hellman

ABSTRACT

Universities are facing an unprecedented wave of claims that they have violated their obligations to Jewish students under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These charges center on an equally unprecedented wave of anti-Israel activity on college campuses, much of which is alleged to cross the line into antisemitism. This essay, forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review Forum, provides one of the first systematic analyses of these exceptionally high-stakes claims about Title VI.

Our analysis reveals that the Title VI claims face formidable hurdles, including some that have received surprisingly little attention thus far. Most fundamentally, Title VI’s omission of “religion” as a protected characteristic means that Jewishness is protected under the statute only insofar as it constitutes a “race” or (less likely) a “national origin.” Under existing law, however, discrimination based on the cultural practices or viewpoints that may be associated with such an immutable characteristic—as Zionism might be associated with Jewishnessis ordinarily not cognizable as discrimination based on the protected characteristic itself. Moreover, if “hostile environment” liability can be founded on offensive conduct that does not constitute covered disparate treatment in its own right, this is likely possible only pursuant to a disparate impact theory that the Trump Administration has denounced and that the Supreme Court has rejected for private suits. Any notion of harassment based on conduct’s “objective offensiveness” would also need to account for distinctive features of the university setting that likely preclude liability for much of the protest activity that has loomed large in recent public discussions of Jewish students’ experiences on campus.

Although specific facts matter and not all of the issues are clear-cut, we thus conclude that appeals to Title VI in

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

(Sidenote: one of our examples comes from the trial record and was cited by the Court itself to illustrate what is permissible—but this was obscured by the opinion's seemingly inadvertent citation to sealed material, until we alerted the Court and it revised the opinion a few months ago.) 3/

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

5) Finally, the focus is on cases, but pretty much everything works for U.S. Code provisions too, sourced from the U.S. House OLRC. The complex indentation is preserved (in the app, in PDFs saved from the app, and in Word export) and cross-references are linked within the app. 10/n

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

4) You can save any representation of a case as a PDF, copy a link and citation, or send it directly to a system service like Messages or Mail. And you can instantly export cases to Word for editing, with logical styles applied, real Word footnotes, and no crazy formatting. 9/n

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

3) Meanwhile, any web-based (Google Scholar or Caselaw Access) representation of the case will be reformatted & processed to remove junk ("L.Ed.2d," etc.), add interactive footnotes, nice justification, etc., and enable in-app links to other cases (or statutes in U.S.C). 8/n

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

2) For any case that is published in the US Reports, the app will also grab that PDF from the Library of Congress, crop it, and generate a navigation menu for opinions in the case. The PDF will take advantage of the screen real estate you give it. (Same for SCOTUS slip opinions.) 7/n

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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

1) Press control + space from anywhere to open a unified, Spotlight-style search field, and get results sourced from Google Scholar, the Caselaw Access Project, the SCOTUS website, and more. (Or select text in a webpage or document and invoke Case Viewer as a macOS service.) 6/n

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