A federal appeals court has given new life to a lawsuit that accuses the University of Georgia of violating a federal gender-equity law when it recruited and admitted a basketball player with a history of sex-assault convictions and again when it took nearly a year to take action after the athlete was accused of raping a female student and helping two other athletes do the same, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

The female student sued the university, its Board of Regents, and a range of university officials, citing their obligations to avoid sex discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (The Chronicle, August 28, 2003). The lawsuit derived from an incident in a Georgia dormitory in 2002 (The Chronicle, April 8, 2002).

A federal district court subsequently dismissed the lawsuit, in part because it said she lacked standing to sue under Title IX, but in a ruling issued on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit revived some elements of the case.

Colleges have faced a rising tide of litigation over such student-on-student sexual harassment since a 1999 Supreme Court ruling said that schools and colleges could be held liable under Title IX if they were “deliberately indifferent” to the harassment (The Chronicle, June 4, 1999). In a session last fall at a meeting of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, a speaker described sexual harassment as the No. 1 source of liability claims against higher-education institutions—“an incredible sea change” in just a decade (The Chronicle, September 28, 2005).