Goldwater Urges AZ Supreme Court to Allow Professor to Sue Over Illegal DEI Training

On Tuesday, attorneys with the Goldwater Institute appeared before the Arizona Supreme Court to defend the right of Arizona State University Professor Owen Anderson to hold the school accountable in court for forcing him and his colleagues into a discriminatory and illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

Goldwater attorneys urged the justices to reverse a lower court ruling concluding that state employees have no right to hold their employers accountable for violating Arizona’s law against discriminatory training.

“Where there is a legal right, there is a legal remedy, is one of the oldest maxims in Anglo-American law,” Jon Riches, Goldwater’s Vice President for Litigation, told the court. “For decades, this court has applied that principle to find implied causes of action where a statute does not expressly create them. Yet, without citing a single one of this court’s cases, the lower court did exactly what this court commanded it not to: it treated legislative silence as dispositive of whether a statute creates a cause of action. But as this court [has held], legislative silence begins rather than ends the inquiry.”

Goldwater lawyers argued today that Anderson has a right to sue the Arizona Board of Regents after he was required to take ASU’s discriminatory “Inclusive Communities” DEI training as a condition of employment.

ASU’s requirement that all its employees take this training is plainly forbidden under Arizona law, which prohibits government employers from forcing their employees to take trainings that present concepts of blame or judgment based on race, ethnicity, or sex. Astonishingly, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the statute does not allow an individual subjected to an unlawful training to challenge it in court.

But that is not the law, according to the Goldwater Institute. They argue it is a basic legal principle that when a statute is designed to protect a specific class of people and would be unenforceable unless those it protects could sue, the statute necessarily implies a right of action for those individuals.

Goldwater attorneys fear that if the ruling is allowed to stand, it will eliminate an essential civil rights safeguard for public employees and taxpayers and broadly prevent Arizonans whose rights have been violated from getting their day in court.

“At stake is a basic question of democracy and government accountability: What recourse do Arizonans have when the government violates a law meant to restrain it?” Goldwater attorneys ask.

“Ultimately, the question now before the Arizona Supreme Court isn’t a left or right issue—and it’s not just about DEI—it’s about whether a state employee has the right to hold their employer accountable when it violates the law,” Anderson said.