A federal court has dismissed a civil-rights lawsuit against Ohio University that was filed by an engineering professor it disciplined as a result of a plagiarism scandal among graduate students, The Athens News reported, but the university still faces a separate defamation lawsuit filed by the professor in state court.

The professor, Jay Gunasekera, was stripped of his duties to advise graduate students and denied pay raises for a year after an investigation of plagiarism by graduate students in the department of mechanical engineering. In the defamation lawsuit, filed in August 2006, he alleged that the university’s statements had ruined his reputation. He later filed the federal lawsuit, contending that Ohio had denied him due process by not giving him an opportunity to try to clear his name.

The university asked the judge in the federal case, Algenon L. Marbley of the U.S. District Court at Columbus, Ohio, to dismiss the suit on several grounds. In his ruling last week, Judge Marbley agreed with the university on most of its points and dismissed the suit.

John Spenceley Marshall, a lawyer for Mr. Gunasekera, told the Athens newspaper that he planned to appeal that ruling. He also said that the defamation lawsuit was the more likely of the two actions to result in significant money damages for the professor. —Charles Huckabee