Two employees of the University System of Georgia—a professor and a basketball coach—sued their employer for sex discrimination under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. After their cases were consolidated, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that Title IX only provides students—and not employees—a private right to sue for sex discrimination. The employees asked the Supreme Court to hear their cases, and the Court agreed to do so.

In July 2026, the Constitutional Accountability Center filed a brief supporting the employees and urging the Court to hold that Title IX authorizes their suits. Our brief makes two main points.

First, under the Supreme Court’s Spending Clause jurisprudence, recipients of federal funds are charged with notice not only of the text of funding conditions but also the legal landscape surrounding those conditions. Particularly in the context of Title IX, this Court has repeatedly imputed to federal funding recipients notice of this Court’s binding precedents and, where applicable, Congress’s ratification of those precedents.  For example, the Supreme Court has held that although Title IX doesn’t use the words “sexual harassment” per se, its precedents make clear that such behavior is forbidden under the law. The Court has used a contract-law analogy to explain the clear-notice requirement: while it would be unfair to hold federal-funding recipients accountable to a condition that they could not have known about, the recipients are expected to take notice of major developments in federal law, just as contracting parties are charged with knowledge of the law of the place governing their contract. Indeed that law is incorporated into the contract itself.

Second, no reasonable person—let alone sophisticated repeat-players like the federally funded universities in this case—could lack clear notice that accepting federal funds creates the possibility of liability in Title IX suits for sex discrimination against employees. In Cannon v. University of Chicago, the Supreme Court recognized an implied private right of action for victims of sex discrimination under Title IX, and Congress later ratified that interpretation. Neither the Court nor Congress ever limited that right to students, as opposed to employees. Indeed, in North Haven Board of Education v. Bell, the Court expressly held that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination extends to employees, and in Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education, it confirmed that employees may sue under Title IX after complaining about sex discrimination and facing retaliation from their employers. Together, these decisions provide clear notice to universities that accepting federal funds may expose them to private lawsuits brought by employees alleging intentional sex discrimination. And these precedents show that Title IX, including its authorization of suits for intentional sex-based employment discrimination, satisfies the special requirements the Supreme Court has imposed on Spending Clause statutes.