University of Memphis Student Defense Lawyer
The University of Memphis matters that come to me tend to arrive in one of two shapes. The first is an allegation routed through the Office of Student Accountability under the Student Code of Rights and Responsibilities, where the student is told a decision-maker will hear the case and given a form and a deadline. The second is a professional-program problem — most often from the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law or the Loewenberg College of Nursing — where the real threat is not a campus sanction at all but an academic standing or professionalism determination that follows the student to a bar examiner or a licensing board. The two require different work, and the first mistake is usually treating them as the same thing.
Overview
Memphis is a public university, so the Fourteenth Amendment applies. Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), establishes that a public institution owes notice of the charge and an opportunity to respond before a disciplinary suspension, with the process owed scaling up as the consequence grows. That is the constitutional minimum. The university’s own published rules generally promise more, and a school is answerable for the procedures it wrote for itself.
Academic decisions sit in a different category. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), and Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214 (1985), instruct courts to defer to genuine academic evaluation reached through careful faculty judgment. That deference is powerful, and it is why the characterization of your matter is worth fighting about early: a disciplinary decision wearing an academic label collects protection it was never meant to have.
Tennessee supplies a further layer. Public universities here publish their student disciplinary rules as state administrative rules, and cases carrying suspension or expulsion exposure are routed through contested-case procedures under the Tennessee Uniform Administrative Procedures Act unless the student waives them in writing in favor of a campus hearing. Whether an attorney may participate is one of the things that changes between those tracks.
Where Memphis cases come from
The volume drivers are large-enrollment and online-delivered courses where similarity and AI-detection scores generate integrity referrals; exam-integrity allegations arising from remote proctoring software; residence hall and student organization conduct matters; and the graduate and professional colleges. Memphis is a full research university with a law school, a nursing college, and a broad set of graduate programs, and in each of those the sanction that hurts is rarely a suspension. It is a dismissal, a required repeat, or a professionalism notation that becomes a disclosure obligation later.
Law students at Humphreys carry an additional problem that undergraduates do not: every conduct or academic-standing file becomes a character and fitness question at admission. The response to a law school allegation should be written with the bar examiners in mind, not only the committee in front of you, because the bar will read it years later and in a different frame of mind.
Which process you are in matters
Academic integrity referrals, conduct charges, Title IX complaints, and academic standing or progression decisions are separate tracks with separate offices, deadlines, and decision-makers. The track dictates the standard applied and how much process you get. Identify yours before you write anything: academic misconduct and honor code, student conduct defense, Title IX and sexual misconduct, law school dismissal and academic standing, or nursing school dismissal.
What to do first
Pull the current Student Code of Rights and Responsibilities and the procedures the Office of Student Accountability publishes from the university’s own site, not from a summary, including this one. If you are in the law school or a health-professions program, pull that program’s handbook as well and read the academic standing and professionalism sections closely; that document usually contains the outcome that actually matters.
Then calendar the deadline in writing, request your file, and preserve drafts, version history, submission logs, proctoring records, messages, and email before any of it is purged. Do not sit for an interview or hand over a written statement until you understand the evidence. Conduct offices routinely add a dishonesty charge based on what a student said during the process, and that charge is often easier for the school to prove than the original one.
What I can help with
- Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
- Helping you prepare your account, your documents, and your questions
- Testing whether the University of Memphis followed its own published procedures
- Scrutinizing software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
- Assisting with the written response and appeal, to the extent the policy permits
- Serving as your advisor where the process allows it
- Negotiating sanction terms, notations, and disclosure language
What a lawyer may actually do in your case depends on that school’s policy. Some tracks permit counsel to participate, some permit a silent advisor, and some permit no outside person at all. Reading the current rule is the first step, and it determines what form the assistance can take.
Common questions
Does a Memphis conduct finding affect my law school application or my bar admission?
It can. Law school applications and bar character and fitness questionnaires ask about disciplinary findings, and they typically ask in broad terms that reach findings never recorded on a transcript. Nondisclosure is generally a worse problem than the underlying incident, which is why the wording of a resolution is worth negotiating even when the outcome is not going to change.
The evidence against me is a plagiarism or AI-detection score. Is that enough?
A score is not a finding. These tools produce probabilistic output, and the question is what the policy requires the university to prove and whether the record actually supports it. Drafting history, version records, and the syllabus language on permitted resources frequently do more work than any argument about the software itself.
How fast do I need to move?
Faster than feels necessary. Response and appeal windows here are commonly measured in days, and the evidence that would have helped tends to be gone by the time a student decides the problem is not going to resolve itself. A flat-fee record review is described on the fees and scope of services page.
Related Tennessee pages: UT Health Science Center, Rhodes College, Tennessee State University, and Union University. The full list is on the Tennessee student defense index.
This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order.
This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.
Attorney advertising. Zachary Gaynor is admitted in Florida and its federal courts, not in Tennessee; Tennessee matters are handled through the framework described on the nationwide practice page — federal-law assessment, campus-process support where the school’s policy permits an advisor, and association with local counsel or pro hac vice admission where required.