On March 4, 2024, the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals' judgment in a case challenging Virginia Tech's bias intervention and response team policy, instructing the court to dismiss the case as moot. The Fourth Circuit decided the case in the university's favor last May,1 adding to a growing body of law addressing whether Speech First, an advocacy organization that purports to represent student speech on campus, has standing to challenge campus speech policies on behalf of its anonymous student members. Like the Fourth Circuit, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the university in a similar case brought against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.2 In contrast, the Fifth,3 Sixth,4 and Eleventh5 Circuits came to the opposite conclusion, holding that the challenged universities' speech policies "objectively chill" student speech to constitute harm sufficient to support standing. The Fifth and Sixth Circuits also specifically rejected the universities' arguments that the challenges were moot due to policy changes, an argument the Supreme Court embraced in its decision to vacate the Fourth Circuit's decision on mootness grounds.
The type of bias policy at issue in the Virginia Tech case has become common at colleges and...
