Chi Iota Colony of Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity v. City Univ. of N.Y.

From Conservapedia

In Chi Iota Colony of Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity v. City Univ. of N.Y., 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 21891 (2d Cir. N.Y. Sept. 13, 2007), the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a rule at a public university prohibiting recognition of single sex fraternities. Judge Pierre Leval, writing for the three-judge panel, overturned a lower court decision in favor of the fraternity.

The dispute arose at the College of Staten Island, a public college that is the City University of New York system. CSI welcomes clubs and fraternities, but imposes the following non-discrimination policy: "membership and participation in it must be available to all eligible students of the College. In addition, in order to be recognized, each organization must agree not to discriminate on the basis of ... gender ...."

Private student fraternities can form without complying with this non-discrimination policy, but they lose the following benefits of official recognition:

• The use of CSI facilities and services

• Eligibility for insurance through the CSI Association

• The right to use the College of Staten Island name in conjunction with the name of your group

• The right to solicit contributions, underwriting and advertising outside the College ...

• The use of all CSI approved bulletin boards to publicize events

• Inclusion of events in monthly calendars ... upon approval by the Office of Student Life

• To arrange news coverage for events of public interest through the Office of Student Life

• The opportunity to request a desk, or workspace in the Campus Center, or weekly meeting space in one of the academic buildings

• The opportunity to apply for special funding through the CSI Student Government

• The exclusive use of a centralized mailbox located in Campus Center ....

A relatively small fraternity named "Chi Iota Colony," and identified by the court as mostly Jewish, excluded females. Its reasons included a statement that admitting women might lead to romantic relationships between members, causing "inevitable jealousies and other conflicts."

The fraternity sought official recognition and, when denied that it sued for a court order based on its First Amendment rights of association. The trial court agreed, issuing an injunction against the school forcing it to recognize this fraternity. The school appealed.

The Second Circuit held that the associative rights of the fraternity did not trigger the difficult-to-satisfy strict scrutiny of regulations against it. Instead, the Court created a new balancing test. "To determine whether a governmental rule unconstitutionally infringes on an associational freedom, courts balance the strength of the associational interest in resisting governmental interference with the state's justification for the interference." The Court held that this will require an assessment of:

(1) the strength of the associational interests asserted and their importance to the plaintiff;
(2) the degree to which the rule interferes with those interests;
(3) the public interests or policies served by the rule imposed; and
(4) the tailoring of the rule to effectuate those interests or policies."

The Court concluded that "[t]he more important the associational interest asserted, and the more the challenged governmental rule burdens the associational freedom, the more persuasive must be the state's reasons for the intrusion, and the more precisely tailored the state's policy must be."

The Court held that the fraternity had a right to meet and exist, but did not have a right to recognition and funding by the public college. It placed particular significance on how the fraternity reached out to the community to attract members, rather than functioning in a manner completely hidden from public view, as though that effects the strength of a club's associative rights. With this reasoning, the Court overturned the lower court's injunction against the school.