A federal court ruled Thursday that IU violated the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestine protesters it banned from campus in 2024 and found the expressive activity policy it passed that August unconstitutional.
The 10 plaintiffs are IU faculty, graduate students and alumni. They were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.
The IU Police Department distributed a number of campus no-trespass orders after arrests at the protests, which a Monroe County prosecutor earlier described as “constitutionally dubious.”
All the plaintiffs had received no-trespass orders, and five of them were later sanctioned by IU for violating a policy that prohibited “expressive activity” after 11 p.m. for participating in candlelit free-speech vigils. The no-trespass orders are no longer in effect.
IU was forced to rescind the formal warnings for nighttime protests after a court order last May. What the court granted this week is an expungement, meaning those letters will no longer be included in the plaintiffs’ files.
ACLU of Indiana attorney Stevie Pactor said she’s happy with Judge Richard Young’s ruling.
“I certainly hope the outcome of this case changes how IU handles the First Amendment,” Pactor said. “We have a federal court telling IU that its expressive activity policy violated the Constitution.”
The case was originally two separate lawsuits, one against no-trespass orders and another against IU’s expressive activity policy written in August 2024. The cases were later consolidated.
However, Young denied the plaintiffs’ claim for damages against university president Pamela Whitten and Superintendent for Public Safety Benjamin Hunter.
Young wrote that “the law was not sufficiently clear” that either of them would have known the trespass warnings violated the protesters’ First Amendment rights and said that both are entitled to qualified immunity.
