A federal judge has dismissed the Justice Department’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard University.
US District Judge Richard Stearns, 82, issued the ruling Thursday in Massachusetts federal court. The Clinton appointee found the Trump administration’s claims legally insufficient.
“The Amended Complaint focuses almost entirely on incidents that took place during the 2023-2024 school year,” Stearns wrote in his order.
He continued, “Only three incidents are alleged to have occurred after this period, all of which took place nearly a full year later (and more than one full academic year before this case was filed) in March of 2025.”
The judge concluded that the cited incidents were “too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.”
The DOJ’s March complaint had charged Harvard with having “turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis” on campus.
The lawsuit sought sweeping penalties against the university. It asked a federal court to freeze more than $2.6 billion in existing federal grants and claw back nearly $1 billion already disbursed.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber, 68, had sharply criticized the case in a closed-door faculty session in April.
“The lawsuit ignores all of the work we’ve done on antisemitism,” Garber said, according to attendees.
He added that some claims were “quite meritless.”
Harvard’s public statement called the lawsuit “yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government.”
Legal experts had predicted the DOJ would face a steep challenge. The “deliberate indifference” standard requires showing a school’s response was clearly unreasonable, not merely imperfect.
“It’s very rare that they did nothing in response,” former Education Department investigator Jackie G. Wernz said of schools in Title VI suits.
She added, “Typically, it’s just that the plaintiff is taking issue with how they responded and whether it was successful — which is not a valid basis for finding a violation.”
Harvard Law professor Benjamin Eidelson had questioned the complaint’s reliance on political speech about Israel.
“The protesters have their view about what’s a fair way to carve up the Middle East,” he wrote in a statement.
“They might be right or they might be wrong, but nobody gets to just rule their position out of bounds as an expression that somehow demeans fellow students for having Jewish ancestry.”
In the viral moment that spawned this legal battle, campus tensions exploded after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Pro-Palestine protests swept Harvard and other elite universities. Jewish students reported antisemitic harassment, from slurs to exclusion from campus spaces. Harvard’s own internal task force documented these conditions in a 300-page report. The university later adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism and expanded staff training. But critics, including the Trump administration, said the response came too late and remained uneven.
Stearns had previously overseen two private antisemitism lawsuits against Harvard. He allowed portions of those claims to proceed, including “deliberate indifference” allegations. But he also dismissed a similar suit by Business School student Yoav Segev in December 2024, finding that anti-Israel rhetoric was not inherently antisemitic without proof of discriminatory intent.
Reps for DOJ and Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the dismissal.