A panel of federal appeals judges has thrown out a $600,000 legal fee award against a group of Jewish parents and teachers who sued over ethnic studies materials taught in some Los Angeles Unified classrooms, reviving a lawsuit that a lower court judge had dismissed with prejudice back in November 2024. The reversal does not decide whether the contested curriculum is discriminatory — it simply gives the plaintiffs another shot at proving they were personally harmed enough to sue in the first place.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an eight-page ruling on September 4, with Judges Kenneth K. Lee, Patrick J. Bumatay, and Jennifer Sung finding that District Judge Fernando M. Olguin erred by dismissing the case outright and awarding anti-SLAPP legal fees before the plaintiffs had a chance to amend their complaint, according to the Metropolitan News-Enterprise. The panel reasoned that a court lacking Article III standing cannot rule on the merits of a case or penalize plaintiffs for filing it, as first reported by LAist. The appeals court agreed with Olguin that the plaintiffs had not yet shown personal harm from the curriculum, but it preserved their right to file an amended complaint and pursue a future trial on the merits.
Who Is Suing Whom
The case, filed in 2022 by Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, targets United Teachers Los Angeles and the creators of the so-called Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, which plaintiffs allege contains racist and antisemitic material that discriminates based on religious belief. The Deborah Project, the pro bono firm handling the case, filed it on behalf of two Jewish LAUSD teachers and parents. Beyond union leadership, the lawsuit names individual educators in both their personal and official capacities, including UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz, LESMCC Secretary Theresa Montaño, and LESMCC CEO Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, who also works as an LAUSD teacher and site coordinator, according to Jewish Legal News.
Los Angeles Unified itself is named only as a minor defendant. The district has not formally adopted the Liberated curriculum, even as UTLA and Myart-Cruz promoted its use in high school ethnic studies courses, per LAist's reporting. That distinction sits at the heart of the legal fight: individual teachers and union leaders have brought the materials into classrooms informally, raising questions about district liability versus a teacher's own First Amendment claims to academic freedom.
What The Curriculum Says About Israel
According to the lawsuit, the Liberated curriculum characterizes Israel as a modern prototype of nineteenth-century European colonialism, with anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel positioned as key elements of the coursework. Its authors include instructors and professors from California State University and the University of California campuses, per the same LAist account. The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium has called the litigation an attack on academic freedom and an attempt to censor educators, arguing that its resources and advocacy for marginalized voices are protected by the First Amendment. The consortium said the reversal will not derail its commitment to developing what it calls anti-racist and liberatory ethnic studies. UTLA did not respond to a request for comment, LAist reported.
Olguin's original dismissal cited California's anti-SLAPP law — short for anti-Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — and raised First Amendment concerns about prior restraint of speech before awarding roughly $600,000 in legal fees to the defendants' attorneys. Jeremy Rosen, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Ninth Circuit panel during oral arguments in Pasadena this past May that an amended complaint would introduce new evidence of student bullying within LAUSD over the past two years, along with specific incidents such as a Jewish teacher being barred from a curriculum meeting, according to Courthouse News Service.
A New State Law Could Reshape The Case
Lori Lowenthal Marcus of The Deborah Project said the organization will refile an amended lawsuit, per LAist, adding that Jewish people are protected from what she described as public trampling of their rights. Attorneys for the plaintiffs believe California Assembly Bill 715, enacted in late 2025, could bolster their case going forward. The law bars public school districts and charter schools from adopting instructional or professional-development materials that subject students to discrimination based on religion or nationality, and it establishes a statewide Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator within the state's Office of Civil Rights, according to FindLaw. The law also extended religion and national-identity discrimination protections to textbooks, materials, and teacher training programs, as LAist noted.
The Deborah Project, headquartered in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, has pursued similar cases elsewhere in the state. On May 26, the firm reached a $325,000 settlement with Northern California's Sequoia Union High School District in Redwood City, according to the Jewish News Syndicate. That settlement created a binding policy through June 2029 reclassifying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a controversial issue requiring neutral classroom instruction, mandated antisemitism training covering bias from both the left and right, and established a neutral decision-maker to resolve disputes over teaching materials and antisemitic incidents, per LAist's account.
How California's Ethnic Studies Mandate Got Here
The dispute traces back to how California built its statewide ethnic studies mandate in the first place. The California State Board of Education approved a standardized Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum in March 2021 only after state leaders rejected a controversial 2019 draft over concerns about anti-Zionist lessons and the omission of Jewish American histories, ordering the contested sections to be largely rewritten, according to the California School Boards Association. That rejection is what pushed activist educators to develop the alternative Liberated curriculum now at the center of the federal case.
Assembly Bill 101, enacted in October 2021, requires all California public high schools to offer ethnic studies courses by the 2025–26 school year and makes completing a one-semester course a graduation requirement starting with the class of 2029–30, according to Liebert Cassidy Whitmore. That statewide timeline has forced districts across California, including Elk Grove Unified and Long Beach Unified, to adopt or overhaul ethnic studies coursework in recent months, while San Francisco's SFUSD has separately weighed pausing its own program amid controversy.
The stakes extend beyond one lawsuit. California Attorney General statistics submitted to state lawmakers in September 2025 showed reported anti-Jewish hate crimes in the state spiked 261 percent over the preceding decade, making Jewish residents the second most targeted group statewide despite comprising roughly 3 percent of the population, according to the Assembly Education Committee's analysis. LAUSD, the nation's second-largest public school district, spans 710 square miles of Los Angeles County and serves more than 520,000 students, the vast majority of whom are Latino. For now, the Ninth Circuit's ruling leaves the core question — whether the Liberated curriculum's treatment of Israel amounts to unlawful discrimination — unresolved, sending the case back to the district court for the plaintiffs to try again.
