When U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns takes up the Department of Justice’s latest lawsuit against Harvard, he will be returning to well-trodden ground — and, in key respects, to questions he has already begun to answer.

Over the past three years, Stearns has presided over a series of cases brought by Jewish students and advocacy groups alleging antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. Most prominently, he has overseen three Title VI lawsuits accusing the University of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

Each case turns on the same core claim: that Harvard permitted a hostile environment — defined by severe and pervasive harassment — and responded with deliberate indifference.

Courts evaluate that claim under a five-part test: whether the conduct was severe and pervasive; whether it deprived students of educational opportunities; whether the institution had actual knowledge; whether it occurred within university programs or activities; and whether the response was clearly unreasonable in light of known circumstances.

Against that backdrop, Stearns has repeatedly allowed claims of deliberate indifference against Harvard to move forward — without yet deciding whether they ultimately hold.

The Justice Department’s 44-page complaint fits squarely within that framework. It alleges that Harvard permitted a climate of verbal harassment, physical intimidation, and exclusion of Jewish and Israeli students to take hold — and then failed to respond in any meaningful way.

In both structure and substance, the argument will not be new to Stearns.

Much of the government’s account — particularly its description of the two-week spring 2024 pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard — closely tracks allegations Stearns considered two years earlier in a lawsuit brought by Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a former Divinity School student.

In that case, Stearns declined to dismiss the complaint in full, describing Harvard’s response to the encampment — and the months of protest preceding it — as “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory.” (Because Stearns heard a preliminary motion to dismiss, he was required to assume Kestenbaum’s factual claims were true.)

Crucially, he made clear that public condemnations of antisemitism were not enough. Praising Harvard’s statement without examining its actions, he wrote, “would reward Harvard for public declarations” that “proved hollow when it came to taking disciplinary measures against offending students and faculty.”

That skepticism rested on specific examples. Stearns pointed to Harvard’s decision to suspend the Palestine Solidarity Committee for the spring 2024 semester, while failing to prevent the group from helping launch an encampment just two days later.

The Justice Department now advances a strikingly similar narrative. Its complaint accuses Harvard of delay and inconsistency, alleging that Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne paid “lip service” to campus rules without enforcing them, that then Harvard University Police Chief Victor A. Clay “sided with the demonstrators,” and that University President Alan M. Garber ’76 lifted punishments after the encampment ended. (Harvard suspended five students and placed more than 20 others on probation for their involvement in the encampment, though many saw the punishments reversed.)

But the government goes further, arguing not only that Harvard failed to act, but that it at times accommodated rule-breaking protesters. The complaint alleges that administrators rewarded demonstrators with “access to Harvard’s leadership,” and cites episodes such as a November 2023 building occupation in which officials provided protesters with food.

Stearns has, in prior rulings, taken such claims seriously. In the Kestenbaum case, he noted that Harvard Law School barred Jewish students from demonstrating in the Caspersen Lounge while permitting pro-Palestine protesters to use the same space.

Later that year, he allowed another set of deliberate indifference claims — brought by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education — to proceed as a class action spanning three graduate schools.

At Harvard Business School, a student was allegedly harassed and assaulted by anti-Israel protesters; Stearns found that the University’s slow-moving external investigation could support a claim of deliberate indifference. At the Kennedy School, he cited Harvard’s failure to act after investigating lecturer Marshall L. Ganz ’64 for discrimination against Israeli students. And at Harvard Medical School, he rejected the University’s claim that it lacked knowledge of a student’s repeated complaints, calling that defense insufficient.

Yet even as Stearns has been receptive to claims of institutional inaction, he has drawn a clearer boundary around protest speech itself.

Last October, the First Circuit affirmed his dismissal of a parallel Title VI lawsuit against MIT, holding that anti-Zionist speech is not inherently antisemitic and cannot be treated as such by the courts.

The panel found that MIT had taken “an escalating series of actions aimed at calming the turmoil without violence” — including suspensions, deadlines, and the eventual clearing of an encampment — sufficient to defeat a claim of deliberate indifference.

Stearns himself had described MIT’s response as “overly measured but nonetheless consistent” — a standard Harvard, in his own reading of the Kestenbaum record, had failed to meet.

He applied that precedent in December, dismissing a third Harvard case brought by Harvard Business School graduate Yoav Segev. Though Segev alleged he had been assaulted during a campus protest, Stearns found the complaint did not establish “severe and pervasive racial harassment.”

A plaintiff, he wrote, “cannot transform his assailants’ anti-Israel sentiment into antisemitism based on their use of certain rhetoric,” citing the First Circuit’s conclusion that slogans like “from the river to the sea” do not, on their own, establish antisemitic intent.

That is the boundary the Justice Department now asks the court to revisit.

Its complaint directly challenges the premise underlying the MIT ruling, arguing that such slogans are widely understood as antisemitic — and that, to “a Jewish or Israeli ear, these chants are racial slurs.”

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.