Case: Goss V. Lopez And The Supreme Court

Imagine a university professor accuses a student of cheating on a final exam. Before the student can defend herself, the university decides to expel the student. Understandably, the student decides she wants to challenge the expulsion as a violation of her due process rights. Can the student challenge the action? Surprisingly, the answer depends on which federal circuit the student lives in. In 1975, the United States Supreme Court held that state law could provide primary students a property interest in their education. However, forty years later, courts remain uncertain of when such an interest exists for university students. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court extended due process protections to a group of high school students in …show more content…
The first part addresses why courts should no longer assume a student has a property interest in education. It will address why the assumption approach is not supported by Supreme Court precedent and will argue that it is time for courts to begin to decide the property interest question. The second part addresses why courts should use the state-specific approach instead of the generalized approach. This section will address why the generalized approach has undermined precedent on property interests, and as a result has created a circuit split on whether the constitution provides students a generalized property interest in their education. Finally, this section will address the advantages of the state-specific approach and explain how the approach is practical for courts to …show more content…
One of the major issues in these cases is whether higher education students have a property interest in their education. The Supreme Court has heard two education due process claims since Goss, but in both cases the Supreme Court choose to assume, without deciding, that a property interest existed. Therefore, the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the property interest issue. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s reluctance to decide the issue, lower courts have struggled to determine whether students have a property interest in education; and unsurprisingly, circuits are split on the issue. This section proceeds in three parts. The first part discusses the background for Goss v. Lopez and property interests in general. The second part examines Goss and the two approaches that have arisen from the decision: the state-specific approach and the generalized approach. Finally, the third part examines the two later Supreme Court decisions, Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz and Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, and the development of the assumption approach to property interests.
A. Due Process and Property