Published by Jewish Insider on 2/06/2025 As the Trump administration’s Department of Education vows to open investigations into five universities alleged to have discriminated against Jewish students, more than a dozen prominent attorneys are joining together to exclusively litigate against antisemitism on campus and beyond, Jewish Insider has learned. Called the Center for Legal Innovation (CLI), the new public interest group launched on Thursday will operate under the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law Center’s umbrella as an expansion of the group’s current civil rights litigation efforts, much of which have recently focused on representing college students alleging antisemitism on campus. CLI’s advisory board will include former Attorney General Bill Barr; Paul, Weiss Chairman Brad Karp; former Solicitor General Paul Clement; and Alan Levine, president of the Legal Aid Society of New York. Levine, who served as lead counsel against white-supremacist organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., told JI that the group of lawyers is “bipartisan, across the legal spectrum [and] will attack antisemitism on the right, antisemitism on the left and antisemitism throughout American society today.” “That’s the real value of this group,” Levine said. “These lawyers are stand-up who know the world of litigation from very different vantage points and we will be able to bring our collective knowledge together to attack instances of antisemitism through litigation and other fact-finding criminal investigations.” Levine noted that the legal challenges surrounding antisemitism in the U.S. have changed in the 16 months since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and ensuing war between Israel and Hamas. “At the time of Unite the Right [and] the Pittsburgh [synagogue] shooting, antisemitism promoted by the alt-right was very front and center in the country,” he said. “After Oct. 7, [there’s been] this ugly proliferation of antisemitism on college campuses and in other organizations that you might say are from the left,” Levine said. “All of these groups and people feed off one another, so it’s important for Americans to see all of the antisemitism as bad and attack it.” While CLI will focus on a variety of forms of antisemitism, including lawsuits in the corporate world, the Brandeis Center — which is currently representing several students in Title VI cases against their universities — says that it has received a tenfold increase in requests for legal support in its campus work alone since Oct. 7. “We have always had the ambition to become a more comprehensive legal services organization, defending the Jewish people against antisemitism, but we wanted to make sure that we were first fully addressing the needs of Jewish students on college campuses,” Ken Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, told JI. “What is clearly needed is a greater litigation capacity to bring the cases that we’ve started bringing within in the last year or so,” Marcus said. These also include lawsuits alleging antisemitism against New York City public schools and the Biden administration’s Department of Education. Other members of the CLI advisory board are: Davida Brook, who secured the $787.5 million settlement to resolve Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and is now representing The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI; Thomas McCarthy, head of Consovoy McCarthy PLLC; Jonathan Polkes, former federal prosecutor and co-chair of Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP’s global litigation department; Jason Torchinsky, partner at Holtzman Vogel; Erik Jaffe, partner at Schaerr Jaffe LLP; David Perla, vice chair of Burford Capital and Rona Kaufman, a law professor at Duquesne University. “I regularly hear about discriminatory conduct in workplaces, unions, sports, housing, healthcare, you name it, it’s infecting every day life for far too many Jewish Americans,” Kaufman told JI. “It is imperative that we use the law to combat unlawful antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”