Higher Ed Wants Liability Protection

Many colleges and universities expect they will reopen in the fall with person-to-person classes. When they do, they could face an unpredictable and potentially intractable financial problem: the cost of liability lawsuits alleging failure to protect students or employees against the coronavirus. Now a major higher education lobbying group is lobbying Congress for liability protection – qualified, as explained in a letter from its president – to leave room for legal recourse where plaintiffs are “harmed by truly bad actors who engage in egregious misconduct.” The institutions are concerned that, because there are so many unknowns about transmission and no agreement about what constitutes acceptable prevention measures, no matter how careful they are they could still find themselves drawn into expensive legal defense.