Law Students Say UC Berkeley Likely Violated Civil Rights of Pro-Palestinian Protesters

UC Berkeley likely violated federal civil rights law in its response to pro-Palestinian protests over the past two years, according to a new report by Berkeley law school students.

In the report, published Thursday, the Palestine Advocacy Legal Assistance Project found that the university repressed pro-Palestinian speech and failed to support or protect Palestinian students who were harassed or assaulted as a result of their activism.

“UC Berkeley’s administration has responded to this mobilization for Gaza by repressing pro-Palestinian speech and punishing Palestinian students and their allies for their activism,” the report’s authors wrote.

The report said that the university’s actions — or in some cases, inaction — likely violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against race, color or national origin.

“An institution need not directly discriminate to violate Title VI. It may also violate Title VI if it demonstrates deliberate indifference to a “hostile environment” created by peer-to-peer harassment,” the report authors wrote.

Israel’s bombing of Gaza as part of the country’s war with Hamas and killing of nearly 70,000 Palestinians has sparked widespread protests on Berkeley’s campus and led to several confrontations between pro-Palestinian activists and Jewish groups, supporters of Israel and faculty members.

As the number of clashes has grown, groups across the ideological spectrum have increased calls for university administrators to intervene, and many have accused the university of failing to take sufficient action.

In March, the Department of Justice began investigating the UC system for violations of civil rights law related to employees facing antisemitism.

Campus Jewish groups are also suing the university for failing to intervene after several student groups implemented bylaws stating that they would not allow supporters of Zionism to speak at their events. Those groups said that the policy does not discriminate against Jewish students, but critics said that those policies disproportionately affect Jewish people.

The university also faced backlash for its decision in September to hand over the names of 160 students and faculty accused of antisemitism to the federal government, as part of the Trump administration’s broader investigations into reports of bullying and harassment of Jewish students on campus. The report’s main finding notably mirrors these accusations by arguing that the university deliberately allowed a hostile environment towards pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

“UC Berkeley has and will maintain an unwavering commitment to Free Speech for all, and to doing all that we can so that every student feels safe and a true sense of belonging regardless of their identity, origins or beliefs,” Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof said. “The campus also continues to urge anyone who has witnessed or has been subject to alleged identity-based discrimination and/or harassment to report to our Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination.”

Thursday’s report cited several incidents where authors said the university failed to intervene.

When protesters blocked part of Sather Gate in early 2024, they faced “daily harassment and sometimes physical violence,” the report said.

One person reportedly became aggressive, threatened protesters’ lives and brandished a knife. That person was placed on a week-long restraining order, the report said, but protesters didn’t press charges, and once the order expired, the man returned.

In April of 2024, during a dinner for law students hosted by Dean of Berkeley Law Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, a Muslim student addressed the group with a microphone to talk about the plight of Palestinian students and the last night of Ramadan.

Chemerinsky and Fisk repeatedly asked the student to leave, with Fisk also seemingly attempting to take the microphone from the student’s hands. The University later opened a civil rights investigation into Fisk, on behalf of the student.

The report accused Chemerinsky of aiming to chill student protest through a statement he made following that incident.

“He wrote that any similar disruptions would be reported to student conduct and noted that student conduct violations are reported to the bar association — a clear threat to protestors’ ability to practice law after they graduate,” the report stated.

“The Fisk incident happened right before I entered in the fall of ‘24,” said Oton De Souza, a second-year law student and one of the authors. “I remember during orientation, it was a very somber moment where Dean Chemerinsky was talking about free speech, but then it turned very cold when he talked about disruption and how that would lead into student conduct [reports].”

While the university has encouraged all community members to report harassment or discrimination, the report also found that Berkeley did not fully investigate some of those reports.

“PALA interviewed a lot of these students who went through this process from the pro-Palestine advocacy side,” De Souza said. “A lot of their requests directly to the university weren’t listened to, and ultimately, some of them just fizzled out and the university never followed up on it.”

Correction, Nov. 4: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza. The story said that nearly 70,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed. That figure represents the total number of Palestinians killed, according to United Nations estimates, and not all were civilians. The story has been updated to remove the word “civilians.”