General Discussion

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.

UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

Court rules pro-Palestine protests cannot obstruct Jewishstudents’ accessibility

While UCLA concurred with the plaintiffs that Jewish students had faced discrimination on campus, attorneys for the university argued against the lawsuit’s legitimacy by claiming that the university itself was not directly responsible for this exclusion of the students. However, Scarsi rejected this claim. He stated that UCLA contributed to the plaintiffs’ exclusion by continuing to offer opportunities to other, non-Jewish students while Jewish peers alleged they could not access the same opportunities, a violation of the Free Exercise Clause.

“The injuries are not simply the exclusion of Plaintiffs,” the ruling said. “The injuries result when Plaintiffs are excluded from certain of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities and campus areas and UCLA still provides those programs, activities, and campus areas to other students, knowing that Plaintiffs and students like them are excluded.”