Opinion ID: 2997825
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Dr. Nanda’s Clearly Established Rights

Text: Having found that Dean Moss’s alleged actions violated Dr. Nanda’s constitutional rights, Dean Moss would still be entitled to qualified immunity if Dr. Nanda’s constitutional rights at issue were not clearly established at the time of these events. It is the plaintiff’s burden to demonstrate the existence of a clearly established constitutional right, Kernats v. O’Sullivan, 35 F.3d 1171, 1176 (7th Cir. 1994), but in determining whether a constitutional right has been clearly established, it is not necessary for the particular violation in question to have been previously held unlawful. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640 (1987). Instead, a clearly established constitutional right exists in the absence of precedent, where “the contours of the right [are] sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.” Id. Additionally, where the constitutional violation is patently obvious, a plaintiff may not be required to present the court with any analogous cases, as widespread compliance with a clearly apparent law may have prevented the issue from previously being litigated. See Kernats, 35 F.3d at 1176. It has been plain in this circuit for quite some time that arbitrary gender-based discrimination, including discrimination in an educational setting, violates the equal protection clause. In 1986, we held that sexual harassment 14 No. 04-1641 constitutes sex discrimination in violation of the equal protection clause. Bohen v. City of East Chicago, Indiana, 799 F.2d 1180, 1185 (7th Cir. 1986). Later, in Nabozny v. Podlesny, 92 F.3d 446, 455 (7th Cir. 1996), we denied qualified immunity in a case claiming that school officials had violated the plaintiff’s right to equal protection through gender discrimination. The Nabozny case, and the Supreme Court cases it relies upon, Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636 (1975), and Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718 (1982) established the principle that schools are required to give male and female students equivalent levels of protection. Nabozny, 92 F.3d at 456. Dean Moss argues that it was not clearly established in July and August 1998 that his concurrence with Dr. Prabhakar’s recommendation would violate Dr. Nanda’s civil rights. This argument, however, does not completely capture the extent of Dean Moss’s conduct under scrutiny on this appeal. We find that a reasonable dean or university administrator was on notice as of 1998 that it would be a violation of federal law to ratify a recommendation to terminate a female professor without investigation into several allegations of gender and ethnic discrimination surrounding the recommendation, and then to falsely report that the recommendation was made with the approval of faculty and an advisory committee.