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

Today, Goldwater Institute attorneys appeared before the Arizona Supreme Court to make a crucial stand for a fundamental principle of law: If a legal right exists, so does the right to enforce it. Specifically, Goldwater is defending 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 that concluded that state employees have no right to hold their employers accountable for violating Arizona’s law against discriminatory trainings. This was Goldwater’s 16^th appearance before Arizona’s highest court.

“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 as to whether a statute creates a cause of action. But as this court [has held], legislative silence begins rather than ends the inquiry.”

The case began in 2022 after Anderson, a philosophy and religious studies professor, received an email from ASU informing him that he was required to take the university’s “Inclusive Communities” training and to pass a quiz that followed. The training included instruction on the alleged moral and social failures of “whiteness” and “heteronormativity,” while the quiz required employees to conclude that spreading DEI and supporting concepts such as decolonizing the university were “correct” answers.

The problem is, ASU’s training is plainly forbidden under Arizona law, which prohibits state agencies from mandating trainings based on concepts of blame or judgment based on race, ethnicity, or sex. The law also bars the use of taxpayer funds to create or implement those kinds of DEI trainings.

In 2024, Goldwater sued the Arizona Board of Regents—ASU’s governing board—on Professor Anderson’s behalf, and a trial court allowed his claim to proceed. Astonishingly, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that Professor Anderson doesn’t have a right to sue, concluding that the statute doesn’t allow an individual subjected to an unlawful, discriminatory training to challenge it in court.

That is not the law. It’s a basic legal principle that 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. If the appeals court’s error is allowed to stand, it will not only eliminate an essential civil rights safeguard for public employees and taxpayers, but it will also broadly prevent Arizonans whose rights have been violated from getting their day in court.

“If the effect of a law is that it can’t be enforced—if the effect of the law is that Professor Anderson’s rights can be violated, but he can’t go receive meaningful protection for that violation in court, well then it has no effect at all. And that’s a problem,” Riches said, “because the legislature set out what the policy is, and if it’s unenforceable then the policy is simply meaningless.”

Goldwater’s appearance at the Arizona Supreme Court also comes as voters in the state prepare to weigh in on Proposition 142, a constitutional amendment that will enshrine the nation’s strongest state protections against DEI and race-based “affirmative action.” Once approved by voters, Prop 142 will prohibit state universities from forcing students to complete DEI coursework to graduate, end state spending for DEI offices, and permanently close loopholes that allow the federal government to pressure schools and state agencies into engaging in race-based preferential treatment.

Click here to read more about the case and to access case documents. 

Click here to read the Goldwater Institute’s position on upcoming Arizona ballot measures, including Prop 142.