The same federal judge who found Harvard University failed its Jewish students has now dismissed the Trump administration's civil rights lawsuit against the school, ruling that the government's evidence fell short of proving an ongoing pattern of discrimination.
U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns tossed the Department of Justice's Title VI case on the grounds that the antisemitism incidents cited in the complaint were "too isolated and episodic" to establish institutionalized noncompliance with federal antidiscrimination law. The ruling hands Harvard a courtroom win in one front of its sprawling legal battle with the Trump White House, though the DOJ signaled it is not walking away.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit against Harvard on March 20, 2026, invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin at institutions receiving federal funds. The complaint centered on alleged discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.
The DOJ's complaint painted a picture of a campus that had turned hostile. Anti-Israel protests had included library occupations and a weeks-long encampment in Harvard Yard. Jewish students, Fox News reported, were harassed and excluded from campus spaces. The government's filing accused the university of institutional indifference.
"Harvard failed to enforce its rules or meaningfully discipline the mobs that occupy its buildings and terrorize its Jewish and Israeli students."
That language came directly from the DOJ's complaint, as the Washington Examiner reported. But Judge Stearns found the factual record too thin to sustain the legal theory. His ruling zeroed in on a critical procedural gap: the amended complaint contained no factual allegations of noncompliance occurring after the government sent Harvard a formal warning letter on June 30, 2025. Under the statute, that warning is a prerequisite before the government can pursue enforcement action, and the judge found nothing in the record showing ongoing violations after that date.
Stearns did not dismiss the seriousness of the incidents themselves. But he drew a firm line between troubling episodes and a provable pattern of institutional lawlessness.
"Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day."
The distinction matters legally. Title VI enforcement requires more than pointing to individual bad acts. The government must show that the institution itself is failing to comply with its obligations in a sustained, systemic way. Judge Stearns concluded the DOJ had not cleared that bar.
The lawsuit had sought to recover billions of dollars in federal research grants awarded to Harvard since October 2023, the Associated Press reported. Harvard receives more than $600 million per year in federal research funding, making the financial stakes enormous for the university.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon responded with a terse statement that left the door open for an appeal.
"We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps," Dhillon said.
The brevity of the statement is notable. The DOJ did not concede any ground on the underlying facts or walk back its characterization of conditions at Harvard. The administration's broader antisemitism enforcement campaign continues. Similar lawsuits have been filed against UCLA, and the DOJ has shown no sign of abandoning its use of Title VI as a tool to pressure universities over campus antisemitism.
The Title VI dismissal does not exist in a vacuum. Harvard and the Trump administration are locked in parallel litigation over federal funding that dwarfs the scope of this single case. The university is pursuing separate legal action to retain nearly $2.7 billion in federal funding. A separate federal judge previously ordered the Trump administration to reverse more than $2.6 billion in funding cuts to Harvard, finding in that case that the White House had used antisemitism as a "smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault" on universities.
That characterization, from a different judge in a different proceeding, cuts against the administration's framing. But it also highlights how politically charged the Harvard fight has become. The antisemitism allegations and the funding disputes have become intertwined in ways that make clean legal resolution difficult.
For conservative legal observers, the tension is real. The campus antisemitism problem is well documented and broadly acknowledged. Jewish students at Harvard and other elite universities have described hostile environments that university administrators were slow to address. The question this ruling forces is not whether the problem exists but whether the DOJ built the right legal vehicle to fix it.
Judge Stearns' ruling rests heavily on procedural ground, not on a finding that Harvard treated its Jewish students fairly. The June 30, 2025 warning letter serves as a statutory trigger. The government needed to show that Harvard continued to violate Title VI after receiving that letter. The judge found the complaint failed to allege any post-warning noncompliance.
That is a fixable problem, at least in theory. The DOJ could gather new evidence of post-warning incidents and refile. It could appeal the dismissal. Or it could pursue enforcement through administrative channels rather than litigation. Dhillon's statement suggests the department is weighing those options.
But the ruling also raises a harder question about the administration's litigation strategy. Filing a major civil rights case and then failing to allege facts that satisfy a basic statutory prerequisite is the kind of error that invites criticism from allies and opponents alike. The Free Beacon noted that Judge Stearns is the same jurist who previously ruled Harvard had failed its Jewish students, making the dismissal all the more striking. If this judge was not persuaded, the evidentiary gap was real.
The DOJ has multiple paths forward. An appeal to the First Circuit could test whether Stearns applied the post-warning requirement too rigidly. A new complaint with fresh allegations of post-June 2025 incidents could restart the case on stronger footing. The administration could also lean on its administrative enforcement powers to pressure Harvard outside the courtroom.
Harvard, for its part, will treat this as validation. The university has framed the administration's legal campaign as politically motivated overreach, and a dismissal on the merits of the complaint strengthens that narrative in the public arena.
The UCLA litigation remains active and could produce a different result depending on the factual record in that case. If the DOJ built a stronger evidentiary foundation there, a favorable ruling could offset the Harvard setback and keep the broader enforcement campaign alive.
Jewish students watching from campus will care less about procedural posture than about results. The incidents the DOJ cited were real. The fear was real. Whether the legal system can translate that reality into enforceable accountability remains an open question.
When the judge who already told Harvard it failed its Jewish students still cannot find enough in the government's complaint to let the case proceed, the problem is not the cause. It is the execution.
