Boermeester v. USC: fair procedure at a private university.
The hardest structural problem in respondent-side practice is that most selective universities are private, and constitutional due process does not reach them. Boermeester is the answer California developed.
The gap it fills.
Doe v. Purdue and Doe v. Baum are constitutional decisions and run only against state actors. A respondent at Columbia, USC, Vanderbilt or Notre Dame cannot invoke them. What remains is contract - the handbook as an agreement - which is useful but narrow, because it asks only whether the institution followed its own rules, however thin those rules are.
What Boermeester adds.
The California Supreme Court held that private universities must provide a fair procedure when imposing serious discipline, and addressed what fairness requires where credibility is central: some mechanism by which the accused can test the account against them. That converts the question from what the handbook promised into what fairness itself demands, which is a materially stronger position where the published procedure is inadequate.
Its limits, stated honestly.
Fair procedure is not constitutional due process and it is not a trial. Courts applying it have been clear that the requirement is a floor rather than a full adversarial apparatus, and the analysis is contextual. It is also a California decision - authoritative there, persuasive elsewhere, and not binding on courts in other states. Presenting it as more than that overstates the position.
Engaging it in practice.
The heightened requirement attaches where the determination turns on whose account is believed - which is true in the substantial majority of campus sexual misconduct matters and is frequently left implicit. Stating it expressly and in writing, and then demanding a mechanism to test the account, is what creates the record. Where the institution refuses, that refusal is the claim, and it runs alongside the contractual argument rather than instead of it.
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