He's been fighting this case for almost a decade now, but he won. Judge Anthony Gabbert said that the school district's reasoning for excluding RMA, which was that he had female genetalia, was not a valid reason. Judge Gabbert said that the district "did not actually determine the nature of RMA’s genitalia."
While I get what you’re saying, the best type of outcome for something like this will be a policy change to avoid similar incidents. However if you were to force policy changes through these sort of lawsuits, you would have the defense fighting for the smallest policy changes and even arguing that these small changes infringe their rights or are cruel and unusual - this would be even more complex to solve, and ineffective. The better way is to make penalties high enough that those penalties themselves motivate policy changes that will actually be effective. It puts the people being punished in charge of their next possible punishment, and this can lead to even better policy changes than simply doing it directly.
For an example, if you sued a company because you stepped on a nail left by their construction crew (which was proven to be willful negligence), they might argue that they can simply sweep up any remaining nails. By changing that to a $1 million fine, they’re going to not only remove all of the nails, but make sure they never get left on the floor ever again. You can’t get this effect by simply ruling “no more nails on the floor.”
Yeah, I mostly used that example since it was a school district so it would be feasible to enact actual policy change that would punish violations internally. I agree that for private corporations this does not work but for public institutions it’s also not as effective of a deterrent as it could be due to lack of direct financial accountability.
While I get what you’re saying, the best type of outcome for something like this will be a policy change to avoid similar incidents. However if you were to force policy changes through these sort of lawsuits, you would have the defense fighting for the smallest policy changes and even arguing that these small changes infringe their rights or are cruel and unusual - this would be even more complex to solve, and ineffective. The better way is to make penalties high enough that those penalties themselves motivate policy changes that will actually be effective. It puts the people being punished in charge of their next possible punishment, and this can lead to even better policy changes than simply doing it directly.
For an example, if you sued a company because you stepped on a nail left by their construction crew (which was proven to be willful negligence), they might argue that they can simply sweep up any remaining nails. By changing that to a $1 million fine, they’re going to not only remove all of the nails, but make sure they never get left on the floor ever again. You can’t get this effect by simply ruling “no more nails on the floor.”
Yeah, I mostly used that example since it was a school district so it would be feasible to enact actual policy change that would punish violations internally. I agree that for private corporations this does not work but for public institutions it’s also not as effective of a deterrent as it could be due to lack of direct financial accountability.