The LAUSD ethnic studies lawsuit brought by Jewish parents and teachers has been revived by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on 4 September 2026 that the plaintiffs must be permitted to file an amended complaint and that approximately $600,000 in legal fees awarded against them should not stand.
The eight-page ruling, issued under case number 24-7676 by Judges Kenneth Kiyul Lee, Patrick Bumatay, and Jennifer Sung, reversed a lower-court decision that had dismissed the case with prejudice and granted anti-SLAPP motions in favour of the defendants.
What the Plaintiffs Alleged
The case, Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of L.A. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, was first filed in 2022. The plaintiffs are Jewish parents with children enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and teachers employed within it.
They alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (the Consortium), along with affiliated teachers and the LAUSD teachers’ union, conspired to introduce curriculum materials promoting anti-Zionist and antisemitic views into district classrooms while concealing that use from parents, the public, and LAUSD itself. The plaintiffs argued this alleged conspiracy was sufficient to characterise the Consortium as a state actor for civil rights purposes.
According to EdSource, the lawsuit alleged that the parent plaintiffs and their children were ‘imminently threatened’ by the curriculum and were ‘being forced to choose between protecting the sincerely held religious beliefs of their children and availing themselves of their legal right to send their children to a California public school.’ LAUSD was named only as a minor defendant.
The curriculum itself has not been formally adopted by LAUSD. The plaintiffs alleged it was being used informally in two classrooms across a district with over 100,000 high school students spread across dozens of schools.
Standing, Anti-SLAPP Fees, and the LAUSD Ethnic Studies Lawsuit
U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Olguin had dismissed the complaint with prejudice on multiple grounds: lack of standing, unripeness, and failure to state a claim. He also granted anti-SLAPP motions brought by the Consortium and the union defendants and, without ever holding a hearing, awarded the defendants’ legal representatives approximately $600,000 in fees, as Horvitz and Levy LLP, the plaintiffs’ counsel, noted in its case summary.
The Ninth Circuit agreed that the original complaint failed to establish standing. The panel held that the ‘mere knowledge that the curriculum is being taught at two classrooms at LAUSD’ was too remote and speculative to constitute an injury-in-fact. The plaintiffs had not alleged that the curriculum was in use at any school where their children were enrolled or where the plaintiff-teachers worked.
The panel was clear, however, that the standing bar had not been set impossibly high. Plaintiffs need not allege direct personal exposure to antisemitic curriculum content, but they must allege ‘having personally suffered some harm plausibly attributable to the curriculum’s spread within the district or the plaintiffs’ schools,’ for instance an independent act of antisemitism causally linked to the curriculum’s use.
During briefing and argument, the plaintiffs offered proposed amendments that the court found could potentially cure those deficiencies, including allegations that the curriculum had proliferated in the two-plus years since the suit was filed, and that their children had suffered related antisemitic acts such as bullying. On that basis, dismissal with prejudice was wrong.
The panel also faulted the lower court for reaching the merits at all. Having concluded that standing was absent, the district court had no jurisdiction to rule on the substance of the claims. The Ninth Circuit accordingly set aside those merits findings.
The anti-SLAPP fee award fell with the merits ruling. As the panel noted, settled circuit authority holds that in federal court a defendant may prevail on an anti-SLAPP motion only once it is clear the complaint cannot be saved by amendment. Because amendment remained available, the fee order could not stand.
The court expressly declined to address whether the plaintiffs’ underlying civil rights claims are meritorious, leaving all substantive questions open.
Consortium Response and Next Steps
The Consortium responded to the decision by stating in a press release, as reported by LAist, that the ruling would not thwart its ‘unwavering commitment to developing ethnic studies that is anti-racist and liberatory’ for California classrooms.
A related subsequent docket has been opened under case number 25-3436, according to Metropolitan News-Enterprise. The strength of any amended complaint will turn on whether the plaintiffs can tie specific harms, including any documented incidents of bullying or curriculum exposure, to the spread of the materials within LAUSD. Subject to any onward proceedings, the case now returns to the district court for the plaintiffs to test whether those allegations can be made to stick.
