A federal appeals court has agreed to rehear a sexual-harassment lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s women’s soccer coach, two months after the court upheld the dismissal of the case, the Associated Press reported today. All 15 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circult will hear the appeal, a rare event. The court, which announced its plans quietly last month, did not explain its reason for granting the appeal.
The eight-year-old case concerns accusations by a former player that the veteran coach, Anson Dorrance, created a sexually hostile environment by making frequent vulgar comments to the team as well as remarks about players’ looks and sex lives (The Chronicle, November 6, 1998).
The former player, Melissa Jennings, was originally joined by a teammate in her lawsuit, but she settled out of court two years ago (The Chronicle, March 25, 2004).
In a ruling this past spring, a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the case on the grounds that Mr. Dorrance’s comments, even if proved beyond question at trial, were still insufficient to demonstrate that he had created—and the university had tolerated—a sexually hostile environment in violation of federal laws (The Chronicle, April 12).
That decision, however, was not unanimous. One of the three judges filed a strongly worded dissent in support of Ms. Jennings’s right to have her day in court. Perhaps that opinion swayed the other judges on the court to rehear the appeal.
