Supreme Court refuses DOJ request to partially reinstate new Title IX rule

The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision denied the Biden administration’s emergency request to partially reinstate its new Title IX rule. 

The sweeping changes to Title IX, which protects against sex discrimination in schools, cover sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time. Various Republican state attorneys general have persuaded judges to block implementation in roughly half the country. 

The Biden administration contended those injunctions went too far, urging the Supreme Court to narrow them to primarily block the prohibitions on gender identity discrimination at the center of the challenges — allowing the other changes to go into effect. 

Those updates, which were set to go into effect on Aug. 1, span from accommodations for pregnant students to retaliation protections to recordkeeping requirements.

“On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the Government has not provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule,” according to the court’s unsigned order. 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented, agreeing with the Biden administration that the lower court rulings were “overbroad.” 

“By blocking the Government from enforcing scores of regulations that respondents never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here,” Sotomayor wrote. 

The decision is not a final ruling in the various lawsuits challenging the new Title IX rule, and the cases will now return to lower appeals courts. The matter could eventually return to the Supreme Court.

The change followed the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that an employer who fires someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Biden administration has defended its updates to Title IX, which covers schools, as consistent with the court’s doctrine. The court’s unsigned opinion indicates all nine justices unanimously agreed that the lower courts were proper to block the central changes related to gender identity at this preliminary stage of the challenges. 

But Gorsuch’s alliance with the court’s liberals on Friday mimics the Supreme Court’s 2020 case, when he wrote the majority opinion.  

Updated at 6:35 p.m.