EDITOR’S NOTE

Tim Burke, Manley Burke, tburke@manleyburke.com

Tim Burke, who recently directed a webinar on CLS v. Martinez for the Center for Excellence and Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law, offers these comments:

Among other reasons the majority used to justify its position in the Christian Legal Society case that lack of recognition did little harm to CLS was their statement that “private groups, from fraternities and sororities to social clubs and secret societies, commonly maintain a presence at universities without official affiliation.”  While it is true that fraternities and sororities can exist “off campus” without recognition by a public university and there is very little the public university can do to prevent that, it is a rare public campus where fraternities and sororities exist without some kind of university sanction or recognition.

The CLS litigation remains pending with the parties wrestling in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals over the issue of whether or not CLS can proceed on its claim that Hastings purported selective enforcement of its “all comers” policy was merely a pretext for the denial of CLS’s recognition.