Karasek v. Regents of the University of California, The

Background

Nicoletta Commins alleged that, while she was enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, another student sexually assaulted her in January 2012. She alleged that the University failed to provide her and other students with education about sexual misconduct, appropriate sexual behavior, consent, and warning signs of dangerous conduct. According to her amended complaint, she would have recognized the other student’s earlier aggressive behavior as inappropriate and would not have continued the relationship or invited him to her apartment if she had received appropriate education.

Commins brought a pre-assault claim under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. The Ninth Circuit had previously held in this case that a school’s pre-assault policy of deliberate indifference—a policy showing more than negligence or carelessness—could support Title IX liability. The district court had allowed Commins to amend her claim after finding that an earlier version did not adequately plead causation.

Motion-to-dismiss standard

The University moved to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which requires dismissal when a complaint does not state a legally sufficient claim. At this stage, the court accepted well-pleaded factual allegations as true and drew reasonable inferences for Commins. The question was whether her allegations were plausible, not whether she had already proven them.

Policy of deliberate indifference

The court distinguished Commins’s current theory from the policy analyzed in the earlier order. The earlier order had focused primarily on the University’s alleged systemic use of an informal process to resolve sexual-misconduct complaints. Commins’s amended theory focused on the University’s alleged failure to educate students about sexual misconduct. The court held that she could not rely on one policy to establish deliberate indifference while relying on a different policy to establish causation.

The court nevertheless concluded that the education-based theory was sufficient at the pleading stage. Commins alleged that a significant number of students were never educated about sexual harassment and violence. The California State Auditor’s report allegedly showed that approximately half of the University’s students had no record of receiving such training in one academic year, although the order noted that this was not necessarily the academic year relevant to Commins. The court held that failing to educate such a large portion of the student body about the fundamentals of sexual misconduct plausibly created an obvious heightened risk of sexual harassment and plausibly showed deliberate indifference if University officials knew or should have known about the risk.

The court rejected the University’s argument that the claim concerned only a narrow type of “safe, sexual conduct” training. It understood Commins’s theory to concern the broader failure to provide many students with basic education about sexual violence, appropriate sexual behavior, and consent. The court also rejected reliance on cases involving failures to train police officers or other government employees, explaining that those cases did not require dismissal of Commins’s different, education-based Title IX claim.

Causation

The court addressed both but-for causation and legal, or proximate, causation. But-for causation asks whether the harm plausibly would not have happened without the defendant’s conduct. Legal causation asks whether the harm was a sufficiently foreseeable result of that conduct. The court concluded that Commins plausibly alleged both: she claimed that proper education would have helped her recognize the other student’s earlier behavior as inappropriate, would have led her not to invite him over later, and would have prevented the assault.

The court found these allegations sufficient at the motion-to-dismiss stage. It treated as reasonable the possibility that Commins would have paid attention to and remembered the training, recognized the earlier behavior as a warning sign, and acted differently. The court stated that causation is usually a fact-intensive question for a jury and found the University’s arguments premature.

Statute of limitations

The University also argued that Commins’s claim was untimely. The court explained that Title IX claims use the applicable state limitations period for personal-injury actions, which California law set at two years. For this type of pre-assault claim, the court had previously held that the claim accrues when the plaintiff knows or should know about the school’s deliberately indifferent policy that created a heightened risk of harassment, rather than automatically when the assault occurs.

The court rejected the University’s argument that Commins necessarily knew about the alleged policy when she realized what training she had or had not received. At the pleading stage, the court could not determine that she should necessarily have known about the University’s alleged systemic educational failures before the California State Auditor’s report was published. The statute-of-limitations argument therefore did not justify dismissal.

Disposition

The court denied the University’s motion to dismiss. The order allowed Commins’s amended Title IX pre-assault claim to proceed; it did not determine the University’s ultimate liability or resolve the factual disputes on the merits.