Federal Court invalidates Solomon Amendment

• 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals Invalidates law requiring Universities to give campus access to military recruiters or forfeit federal funding

A divided federal appeals court in Philadelphia today invalidated the Solomon Amendment, the 10-year-old federal law that requires universities to give campus access to military recruiters or forfeit federal funding. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, ruling in a challenge filed last year by a group of New Jersey law professors and students, said the law violated university free-speech rights and that government lawyers had failed to offer a "shred of evidence" that the law benefited military recruitment." The Third Circuit panel - the first in the nation to decide the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment - ordered the federal judge in New Jersey to issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the law and legal experts said the order would likely be considered to have a national impact. "This is definitely groundbreaking," said E. Joshua Rosenkranz, a New York lawyer who argued the case on June 30 for the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the Society of American Law Teachers Inc., and seven other parties. "This is a victory for liberty and equality, a victory for conscience over compulsion." [more]