The district court dismissed the suit without any chance for the parties to file an amended complaint; the Ninth Circuit agrees that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue the claim, but permits them to submit an amended complaint to “cure the standing deficiencies” (assuming they can).
From Concerned Jewish Parents & Teachers of L.A. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, decided Friday by Judges Kenneth Kiyul Lee, Patrick Bumatay, and Jennifer Sung:
This dispute concerns an ethnic studies model curriculum intended for use in high school classrooms, created and championed by the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (the Consortium), an advocacy organization. The proposed curriculum has not been formally proposed to nor adopted by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Yet the plaintiffs—comprising Jewish parents with children enrolled in LAUSD and teachers within that district—contend that at least two teachers are informally employing the curriculum, which is alleged to promote anti-Zionist and antisemitic viewpoints. The plaintiffs further allege that the Consortium, together with the LAUSD public school teachers’ union and individuals affiliated with these entities, exert informal influence over district-wide curricular offerings. The plaintiffs filed suit asserting civil rights claims under both federal and state law. The district court dismissed the case with prejudice for pleading shortcomings….
The court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing:
Without more concrete allegations, the plaintiffs have not shown that they personally endured the harm of religious or racial discrimination. The complaint does not allege that the curriculum—though used in two classrooms—is being taught in any classroom or even at any school attended by the plaintiffs’ children or where the plaintiff-teachers work. The asserted harm—the mere awareness that the curriculum is being taught in two LAUSD classrooms, an district with more than 100,000 high school students across numerous schools—is too remote and speculative to constitute an injury-in-fact.
Our circuit’s standing precedent does not require the plaintiffs to show that they or their children were directly exposed to antisemitic elements of the curriculum. But they must at least allege that they have personally suffered some harm plausibly connected to the curriculum’s spread within the district or the schools of the plaintiffs—for example, that the plaintiffs experienced an independent act of antisemitism causally tied to the curriculum’s use in LAUSD or the school…. [Nor do they] provide … facts that would indicate inevitable or likely exposure to the curriculum (or its harmful effects)….
Nevertheless, the court held that the plaintiffs should have been permitted to file an amended Complaint:
During briefing and at oral argument, the plaintiffs proposed several amendments that could potentially cure the standing deficiencies. For instance, they suggested that the challenged curriculum has spread across more than two years since the suit was filed, and that the plaintiffs’ children have endured related antisemitic incidents at school (such as bullying)….
The court made clear that it would not address the merits of the case, and criticized the district court for considering merits work (“Because the district court concluded that plaintiffs lacked standing, it should not have reached the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims”).
And the court concluded that, since the plaintiffs should be permitted to file an amended complaint, the district court should not have awarded defendants attorney fees under the California anti-SLAPP statute: “[O]ur circuit has held that in federal court, a defendant may only prevail on an anti-SLAPP motion once it is clear the complaint cannot be saved by amendment.”
A November 2024 post quoting the district court decision is also available.
