Dorf on Law

Yesterday on this blog, I reproduced my supplemental statement  to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for its campus antisemitism investigation. I simultaneously published a Verdict column describing and praising the Commission's final report on that subject. In today's essay, I want to explore some oddities of federal civil rights law raised by the topic. In my column, I state that discrimination (or inadequate measures to respond to discrimination) against Jews by a federally funded entity violates Title VI, where the discrimination is based on "Jewishness as a matter of ancestry." Readers unfamiliar with the details of federal civil rights law may wonder why I didn't simply say that such discrimination would violate Title VI as religious discrimination. The short answer is that Title VI forbids discrimination "on the ground of race, color, or national origin" but not on the basis of religion. Anti-Jewish discrimination is sometimes covered only bec...