Judge issues injunction in case involving exclusion of Jewish students from campus facilities during protest over war in Gaza

A federal court has issued an injunction against the University of California Board of Regents, requiring school officials to shut down – for any student – a university facility that is not accessible to Jewish students. The suit alleges that officials failed to protect the right of Jewish students at UCLA to full access of university facilities during protests in the spring about the war in Gaza, when pro-Palestine student protestors gained control of certain areas of campus and, according to reports cited, “people who supported the existence of the state of Israel were kept out of the encampment.”

The court described the shocking scene and its legal conclusions in the opening paragraph of its opinion:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is … unimaginable and … abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom … . UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

The court explained that the plaintiffs – Jewish students who felt they had to disavow their faith if they wanted to traverse the encampment in order to go to certain classes or to access the library at all – were harmed not just by their exclusion from areas of campus, but most importantly by the fact that the university continued to make such services available to other students who were allowed freely to enter. Such a discrepancy “raises serious questions going to the merits of their Free Exercise claim.” Citing recent U.S. Supreme Court cases (like Trinity Lutheran and Carson v. Makin) the court emphasized that “a state violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.”

State officials argued that they should have broad discretion in enforcing safety measures, and that changes to their policies and procedures meant that the plaintiffs were not likely to suffer harm going forward. But the court reasoned that the fall semester could likely bring new protests and encampments, and the court narrowly tailored the injunction to protect school officials’ ability to maintain order, up to a point:

[T]he injunction does not mandate any specific policies and procedures UCLA must put in place, nor does it dictate any specific acts UCLA must take in response to campus protests. Rather, the injunction requires only that, if any part of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas become unavailable to certain Jewish students, UCLA must stop providing those ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas to any students. How best to make any unavailable programs, activities, and campus areas available again is left to UCLA’s discretion.

 You can read the opinion here. With school starting up again across the country, stay tuned.