The U.S. Department of Justice is appealing the dismissal of its antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard University, seeking to revive a case in which the government wants to recover nearly $1 billion in federal grants over the university’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students.
The department filed its appeal on Thursday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, challenging U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns’s Aug. 13 dismissal of the case.
The lawsuit, which the federal government filed in March, alleges that Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to adequately address antisemitism and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The government alleges that students were harassed, assaulted and intimidated on campus and that Harvard failed to enforce its rules against those responsible.
The Justice Department is seeking to compel Harvard to comply with Title VI and recover federal funds it says the university received while violating the law. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Harvard was set to receive more than $2.6 billion through active grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Justice Department.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the nonprofit National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the strongest argument on appeal may center on the distinction between stopping future violations and recovering money already paid out.
“The judge assumed the government could sue to get back funds Harvard drew during the violation years, then threw that claim out because nothing happened after the government’s notice letter,” Goldfeder said. “But recovering past funds is backward-looking by definition, and notice always comes after the violation it describes.”
He said that under Stearns’s reasoning, the government could have little practical ability to recover money already paid to a university for past Title VI violations.
“The Supreme Court has said for forty years that recovering money drawn on broken funding assurances is collecting a debt,” Goldfeder told JNS. ‘A debt does not vanish because the debtor behaves once the letter arrives.”
Stearns ruled that the government had not sufficiently shown that Harvard remained in violation of Title VI after the university was formally notified of the allegations in June 2025.
The judge described the incidents cited by the government as “too isolated and episodic” to establish “a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.” He noted that the lawsuit focused largely on incidents from the 2023-24 academic year and cited only three incidents from March 2025.
Goldfeder told JNS that he believes Stearns got it wrong.
“Congress never wrote an ongoing-violation requirement into Title VI. The court invented one,” he said. “And this is the same judge who found in 2024 that Harvard ‘failed its Jewish students.’ Two years later those findings rated a footnote, and the United States got four pages.”
‘A different claim entirely’
Stearns also said Title VI enforcement is intended to bring institutions receiving federal funds into compliance with civil-rights law, rather than punish them for past violations.
That distinction is central to the funding dispute, according to Goldfeder.
“Cutting off future funding is forward-looking,” he told JNS. “It exists to force compliance. It comes with hearings and reports to Congress, and a school that genuinely cleans up its act can keep the money flowing.”
“Recouping past funds is a different claim entirely,” he added. “Harvard certified compliance, drew billions on those certifications and broke them. The law treats that as a debt owed for money taken on a promise that wasn’t kept, and stopping the misconduct after you’re caught doesn’t repay it.”
Under the First Circuit’s briefing schedule, Justice Department lawyers will have 40 days after the appellate record is filed to submit their opening brief.
The First Circuit will “look at every question fresh,” and the government may also try to build a separate case around “the period after the notice, where 170 Harvard faculty publicly warned that antisemitism went underground rather than away, and the administrative route to terminating funds remains open,” Goldfeder said.
“The ruling as it stands lets a university violate civil rights law for two years, keep every federal dollar, and win by going quiet once the government writes a letter,” he told JNS. “No court would accept that result for any other minority group, and it should not be accepted here.”
The department is separately pursuing two other Harvard-related appeals before the First Circuit, including litigation over $2.2 billion in federal funding and the university’s ability to enroll international students.
