FIRE's Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus (Fire's Guides to Student Rights on Campus)

Time and again, students on our nation’s college and university campuses are subjected to campus courts where due process is completely absent. FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus provides information about the appropriate and inappropriate methods by which university administrators and student judicial panels address issues of academic misdeeds and behavioral misconduct. This Guide also provides a history of how due process issues have been handled by the courts and gives several examples of institutions at which procedures are handled with the utmost concern for fairness. These will serve as models for the proper execution of campus justice. Because it is crucial to choose the most effective grounds on which to base a claim of unfairness, the Guide will introduce readers to both legal and moral arguments, explaining how these may be used on private and public campuses. Readers can expect the Guide to answer, thoroughly and compellingly, such difficult questions as:

How can one evaluate judicial procedures at my school for objective fairness?

How does one know if one’s rights have been violated?

What are the best arguments to use against unfair procedures?

Is the law on my side? What is the modern history and current status of the United States Supreme Court’s view of "due process of law," and how has this concept been applied to university campuses (public, private, and sectarian)?

What kinds of federal and state legal doctrines, aside from federal constitutional rights, both protect and restrict the rights and powers of public, of private, and of sectarian institutions of higher learning in with regard to disciplinary and other adjudicatory proceedings?

Harvey A. Silverglate, co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a lawyer and journalist who for 33 years has specialized in civil liberties and criminal defense cases. Mr. Silverglate is the co-author, with Alan Charles Kors, of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on Americas Campuses.

Josh Gewolb is a Program Officer in FIRE's Boston office. Mr. Gewolb writes frequently about civil liberties and criminal law, often in collaboration with Mr. Silverglate. He is a recent graduate of Harvard College, where he was an editor at the Harvard Crimson.