Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus

Plot

Students should know their rights and liberties, and they need to be better informed and better equipped about how to assert and defend these precious things. The protectors of students' rights and liberties--those faculty, administrators, parents, alumni, friends, citizens, advisors, and attorneys who care about such vital matters--should understand the threats to freedom and legal equality on campuses, the moral and legal means of combating those threats, and the acquired experience of recent years. To that end, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) offers this "Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus," part of a series of such guides designed to restore individual rights and the values of a free society to the nation's colleges and universities. These guides also should remind those who write, revise, and enforce campus policies of the legal and moral constraints that restrict their authority. The sooner that colleges and universities understand their legal and moral obligations to a free and decent society, the less need there will be for guides such as these. Appended are: (1) The First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments; and (2) Cases.