This is an interesting case.
On the one hand, there’s the general principle that the coach has broad discretion to decide who gets to be on the team. Absent some specific legal right that he may be violating, courts do not adjudicate the fairness or correctness of those kinds of decisions. The same is true of at-will employment. Your boss can fire you for almost any reason at all, and it can be completely unfair, but that doesn’t mean you have a legal claim. UNLESS…the termination was for some specifically proscribed reason, such as discrimination against members of a protected class. In the employment context, these cases end up being all about the plaintiffs trying to prove through circumstantial evidence that the stated reason for the termination was a pretext for unlawful discrimination. The fact that something is a privilege (being on a varsity team, working at a particular job) doesn’t mean that it can’t be unlawfully taken away.
In this case, the plaintiff does have rights under Title IX, and in recent years there have been MANY cases in which male students have won Title IX cases premised on lack of due process in campus sexual assault hearings. (The plaintiff in this case technically asked for relief on just his contract claim, but the contract explicitly incorporates Title IX, so it’s basically the same thing.) Without going into too much detail, the takeaway is that a lack of due process for the accused is considered sex discrimination against men. (Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex; it’s not limited to discrimination against women.) So the argument here is pretty straightforward: Yes, the coach has general discretion to kick me off the team for any reason, but he can’t kick me off the team as a de facto punishment for wrongdoing of which I wasn't found guilty under fair procedures.
Passing the buck to the other athletes shouldn’t’ work either. If the judge were treating this case like an employment case, there’s no way this reasoning would fly. You couldn’t get away with saying, “I fired this gay employee for no reason other than that he was bad for morale because my homophobic employees didn’t want to work with him.” The same is true if you try to pass the buck to your racist customers. You couldn’t legally justify firing a black salesperson by saying, “well, I had no problem with him, but my customers are all racist.”
A little bit of procedure for the non-lawyers. The ruling everyone is talking about is the judge denying a request for a temporary restraining order (TRO). This is a short-term remedy that would get Doe back on the team while the case is pending. With TROs (and preliminary injunctions), the court is not supposed to provide relief unless he thinks it’s likely that the plaintiff will eventually win the case. Denying relief doesn't technically end the case, but it can signal that the court is likely to dismiss it eventually. I think this judge will.
In this ruling, the judge SAID that there were no real factual disputes, but if you look at the actual discussion, he seems to be drawing every conceivable inference in favor of Haverford. Basically, the judge says, “it’s totally possible that you were kicked off the team for reasons unrelated to the sexual assault allegation.” Sure, it’s possible the guy is a huge jerk and a misogynist. But if that's true, why didn't it happen earlier? Given the sequence of events, it seems more plausible that this is simply a de facto punishment for alleged sexual assault. In fact, the judge later seems to admit as much when he says that concerns about “mob justice” are not the concern of the court. But of course they are! That’s the entire point of the Title IX claim, and the court wouldn’t have had to bend over backwards to say the claim was implausible if Title IX didn’t impose limits on “mob justice.”
It's also troubling that the court concluded that losing the opportunity to compete in school sports does not constitute an “irreparable injury” for purposes of injunctive relief. Basically, the rule is that you aren’t supposed to get preliminary relief if your injuries can be fully redressed with monetary damages. That’s often the case in, for instance, a commercial contract dispute. The notion that permanently losing the opportunity to compete as an NCAA athlete doesn’t constitute an irreparable injury strikes me as beyond absurd.
To be clear, I have no idea what the real facts of this case are. Nobody does yet. But the judge’s ruling here seems problematic.