In a Nov. 13 letter to Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, five civil rights organizations issued a legal warning against the college, claiming that Starr’s decision to suspend a group of students for their alleged participation in the Oct. 7 protest was a violation of their rights under California law.
Palestine Legal, the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California claimed that Pomona punished students for the act of protesting, consequently violating their rights to free speech, expression and association under California’s Leonard Law. In the letter, the groups urged Pomona to immediately lift the “unlawful suspensions.”
The Leonard Law is a California state law passed in 1992 and amended in 2006 that protects free speech for students at private post-secondary institutions, which were initially not subject to the same constitutional obligations that public institutions were…