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Supreme Court Case Study: Horowitz And Ewing

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The assumption approach is the result of two Supreme Court cases, Horowitz and Ewing. In Horowitz, a medical student brought a due process claim against the University of Missouri-Kansas City for dismissing her for academic reasons. The Supreme Court first discussed whether Horowitz had a protected interest. The Supreme Court noted that the plaintiff never alleged a property interest, but that if she were to do so, she would have to rely upon Missouri state law to have a valid claim. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court assumed the plaintiff had a property interest in her case without deciding the question. Instead of addressing the property interest question, the Supreme Court found that the university provided the plaintiff sufficient process under the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore the Supreme Court never determined whether the student had a property interest in her education. Seven years later, the Supreme Court, in Ewing, revisited the question of whether a university student has a property interest in his education. In Ewing, the University of Michigan dismissed a student for failing an …show more content…

Currently the Fifth and Eighth Circuits almost exclusively use the assumption approach when addressing property interests in student due process cases. The assumption approach is different from other approaches this Comment has addressed, because it does not actually decide whether a student has a property interest. Instead, the assumption approach serves as a gap-filler for courts to avoid property interests, unless the particular facts of a case require that it does so. Instead of deciding whether a property interest exists, many courts proceed straight to determining whether a university provided a student sufficient

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