What the Columbia Riot Decision Gets Wrong About Civil Rights

I n April 2024, two men went to work at Columbia University. They were surrounded by masked rioters, punched, barricaded inside the school’s Hamilton Hall, called “Jew-lovers,” and physically prevented from leaving. They eventually escaped, but they did not recover. They lost their janitorial jobs, and they remain on workers’ compensation. And yet a federal court just told them that none of this adds up to a civil rights violation.

Judge Colleen McMahon’s decision dismissing the Section 1985(3) claims of Mariano Torres and Lester Wilson in Torres v. Carlson is carefully reasoned but wrong in several important respects.

The central holding is that the conspirators who seized Hamilton Hall did not conspire for the purpose of depriving anyone of their civil rights. In the court’s view, the antisemitism was mere backdrop, and the violence against Torres and Wilson was a “side effect” of a political protest. Under Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, a conspiracy isn’t actionable just because it has an effect on protected rights; deprivation of those rights must be a “conscious objective” of the enterprise.

Fine. But the court misapplies its own standard.

Bray involved protesters whose target, the Supreme Court said, was abortion, not women as a class. That logic does not transplant cleanly to an assault by rioters who pre-planned contingency violence, explicitly categorized and explained their violence in antisemitic terms, then hung an “INTIFADA” banner when it was over.

The court treats the slurs as incidental noise from unnamed individuals, but Torres and Wilson weren’t called “Jew-lovers” by one random protester who went off-script. They were called “Jew-lovers” by the mob attacking them, as an explanation for why they were being attacked. That is not a side effect. That is literally the frame through which the conspirators themselves understood the situation. The antisemitic vocabulary was the operational logic of the assault.

Nor does the First Circuit’s recent Title VI MIT decision point the other way. The court in StandWithUs v. MIT rejected the proposition that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism, but it recognized that anti-Zionism may be wielded as “a tool of the antisemite” when the surrounding facts support that inference. Torres and Wilson are not asking a court to treat political speech, standing alone, as a civil rights violation. They allege a coordinated seizure, planned violence, physical detention, antisemitic slurs directed at them during the assault, and an “INTIFADA” banner displayed as the operation’s message. For all its deficiencies, the MIT decision was about when speech crosses into actionable harassment. This case is about whether antisemitic violence can be whitewashed by labeling it protest.

The court also reasons that because the conspirators planned to use force against anyone who got in their way — not just Jews or those who sympathize with Jews — the conspiracy lacked racial animus. That is also wrong.

The Klan didn’t target only black Americans. They killed white civil rights workers, too. Under McMahon’s reasoning, a mixed-target conspiracy can never satisfy the class-based animus requirement, because the conspirators’ willingness to harm anyone dilutes the discriminatory character of the enterprise. That is not what Griffin v. Breckenridge held, and it isn’t what Congress intended when it passed the Ku Klux Klan Act.

Griffin recognized Section 1985(3) as a civil remedy against conspiracies animated by racial or class-based invidious discrimination. And United Brotherhood of Carpenters v. Scott later explained that the statute’s predominant purpose was to combat animus against a protected class and its supporters. Section 1985(3) does not require that a conspiracy target only members of the protected class. It requires showing that class-based discriminatory animus motivated the conspiracy. A mixed-target conspiracy does not become non-discriminatory simply because the conspirators are willing to harm anyone who obstructs the mission. If racial or antisemitic animus helps define that mission, identify the enemy, or justify the violence, then the statute is implicated.

Here, as alleged, the takeover was organized around a pro-Hamas and antisemitic ideology, executed under slogans of intifada, and explained to its victims in antisemitic terms while it was happening. The conspirators’ willingness to also assault whoever else stood in their way does not launder the antisemitism out of the enterprise.

The court’s class analysis has a similar problem. It holds that “people who are or are perceived to be Jews or supporters of Jews” is too amorphous to constitute a cognizable class under Section 1985(3). The court relies in part on Jews for Jesus v. Jewish Community Relations Council, where the Second Circuit held that Jews are protected under Section 1985(3), but that a racially mixed organization could not itself sue as the racial class of Jews.

But the question here is not whether every person who might be described, in the abstract, as a “supporter of Jews” could form a free-floating class. Jews for Jesus does not address whether those targeted because they are supporters of Jews can mount a claim under 1985(3); Carpenters already settled that question in the affirmative. People targeted because they are Jews, are perceived to be Jews, or are perceived to be standing with Jews fall within the protective purpose of the Klan Act, in the same way that white civil rights workers beaten while marching for black Americans have always been within the statute’s ambit.

The court acknowledges this principle and then refuses to apply it, concluding that Torres and Wilson weren’t “really” supporters of Jews because their political beliefs were unknown. But that confuses two different questions: whether the class is cognizable, and whether these plaintiffs fit within it. The answer to the second question might be contested on remand. But disposing of the first question by reference to the second is nothing more than a logical error.

There is also a deeper problem the court doesn’t address. Federal civil rights law uniformly protects people targeted based on perceived membership in a protected class. Title VII covers it. The Americans with Disabilities Act covers it. Section 1981 has been read to cover it. The conspirators called Torres and Wilson “Jew-lovers” and told them they were “working for the Jews.” Maybe Torres and Wilson had no views at all about Jews or Zionism. But Section 1985(3) should not turn only on the victim’s private beliefs when the attackers themselves supplied the protected-class frame. Whatever Torres and Wilson actually believe, their attackers decided what category they belonged to. The court offers no principled reason why Section 1985(3) should uniquely exclude perceived-class-membership claims when the rest of the civil rights canon does not.

The state tort system can compensate Torres and Wilson for their injuries. It cannot name what was done to them. That is what the civil rights laws are for, and the Second Circuit should have the chance to say so on appeal.