A federal judge dismissed with prejudice a lawsuit against AB 715, California’s law aimed at combating antisemitism in K-12 schools, on Tuesday, barring the plaintiffs from bringing the same claims again.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed the lawsuit in November on behalf of parents, teachers and students in California, as well as Los Angeles Educators for Palestine, alleging that the law violates the First Amendment.
AB 715, which took effect in January, creates an antisemitism prevention coordinator within the state’s Office of Civil Rights and establishes requirements for addressing discrimination in schools.
Noël Wise, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked enforcement of the law while the case proceeded. In a Dec. 31 ruling, Wise said the plaintiffs “have failed to demonstrate that their classroom speech is protected by the First Amendment” and therefore “failed to allege an adequate First Amendment violation.”
Wise also stated that the plaintiffs made “inconsistent” arguments by claiming the law was vague in its definition of antisemitism while objecting to the inclusion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition.
In Tuesday’s ruling dismissing the case, which JNS reviewed, Wise wrote that the plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion to dismiss repeated “several arguments that the court has already considered and dispatched” and did not provide a compelling reason for the court to revisit its previous findings.
She stated that the only new argument provided was that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it establishes an antisemitism prevention coordinator under an office of civil rights while leaving coordinators for other protected classes to future legislation. Wise rejected that argument, writing that the law addresses antisemitism in a neutral manner and that the state’s civil rights office established under the law is intended to address all forms of discrimination, not only antisemitism.
Wise also cited SB 48, a companion bill to AB 715, a companion measure signed into law that creates “additional coordinators tasked with rooting out different types of discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of race or religion,” thus undermining the argument.
David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, stated that “this ruling affirms what we’ve said from the start: AB 715 is a critical and constitutionally sound tool to address antisemitism in schools, alongside protections the legislature has extended to other forms of discrimination through companion legislation.”
