Cottage Industry

Cottage Industry: Where's Janet?

For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus...

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of Homeland Security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that "a cottage industry is being created" on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities. "Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system," she said, policymakers should ask if "more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases." Under pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, campuses are rushing to set up a parallel legal system to investigate and rule upon murky encounters that often involve inebriated students. They must decide within 60 days whether it is "more likely than not" that an alleged perpetrator was guilty. And they make those decisions without many of the legal protections associated with a criminal trial...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-campus-sexual-assault-20150817-story.html

The Yale Law & Policy Review article is at:
http://ylpr.yale.edu/sites/default/files/YLPR/33.2_policy_essay_-_napolitano_final.pdf 

(As you might expect, the article goes on for pages and pages describing the requirements and praising the intent of the requirements before sticking the knife in and twisting.)