Tulane University Student Defense Lawyer
Tulane students usually contact me at one of two moments: right after a charge letter or investigation notice lands, or right after a decision they did not expect. Tulane is a private research university in New Orleans, and that single fact reorganizes the legal analysis. There is no state action here, so the constitutional arguments that carry weight at LSU or Southern largely drop out, and what remains is the university’s own written word — the code of student conduct, the school and program handbooks, the catalog, and the policies each school publishes for academic standing. Those documents are the contract. Reading them closely, in the versions that applied when your matter began, is where a Tulane case is won or lost.
Overview
At a private university the handbook and catalog do the work the Constitution does at a public one. The claim, when there is one, is that the institution promised a process and then departed from it — a required committee step skipped, a stated deadline compressed, a standard applied that appears nowhere in the published policy, a sanction outside the range the policy allows. That framing is the subject of my page on breach of contract against universities. Federal law still applies regardless of private status: Title IX, Section 504 and the ADA, and FERPA reach Tulane the same way they reach any institution receiving federal funds. And where the dispute is about academic evaluation rather than discipline, the deference principle recognized in 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), shapes what any reviewer — internal or external — is willing to second-guess.
Where Tulane cases come from
Tulane’s undergraduate population runs through Newcomb-Tulane College and into the School of Liberal Arts, the School of Science and Engineering, the A. B. Freeman School of Business, and the School of Architecture, and the recurring undergraduate matters are academic integrity, alcohol and residential conduct, student-organization discipline, and Title IX complaints. The integrity cases increasingly rest on software output — similarity reports and AI-detection scores — which deserve interrogation rather than concession.
The graduate and professional schools are a different practice. The Tulane University School of Medicine, one of the oldest medical schools in the country, runs promotion, remediation, and professionalism review through its own committees, and a finding there follows a student into the MSPE, residency applications, and licensure. The Tulane University School of Law, founded in 1847 and teaching in a civil-law state, runs academic standing and conduct review with bar character-and-fitness consequences attached. The School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the School of Social Work, and the School of Professional Advancement each publish their own progression rules. In every one of those programs, the program-level policy usually decides the case, and the university-wide code is secondary.
Which process you are in matters
Tulane routes conduct allegations, integrity allegations, Title IX complaints, and academic-standing decisions along different paths, with different deadlines, different decision-makers, and different appeal rights. The label controls all of it. A decision that is disciplinary in substance but carries an academic label deserves to be contested on that basis, because academic labels attract deference that disciplinary findings do not. Identify your track before you write anything: student conduct, Title IX, academic dismissal or suspension, or medical school dismissal and remediation.
What to do first
Download the current code and the handbook for your school or program from tulane.edu, and note the edition — the version in effect when your matter began is the one that governs, and a later revision does not retroactively legitimize a departure from the earlier one. Calendar the deadline the day the notice arrives; these windows are measured in days. Request your file and the evidence the university says it holds, in writing. Preserve drafts, version history, submission logs, group chats, and email with instructors and administrators before anything is deleted. And do not sit for an interview or submit a written statement before you understand what the evidence actually is. A separate charge for dishonesty during the process is a common and avoidable self-inflicted wound.
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 Tulane 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 an advisor of choice who may be an attorney, some permit a non-participating advisor, and some permit no outside person at all. The current policy for your track answers that question, and it determines whether the assistance takes the form of appearing with you or of building the file and the written submission behind you.
Common questions
Tulane is private. Do I have any rights at all?
Yes, but they come from different sources. The handbook and catalog are enforceable promises about process, and federal statutes — Title IX, Section 504 and the ADA, FERPA — apply regardless of private status. What you generally do not have is a constitutional due-process claim, which is why the analysis starts with the text of the policy rather than with the Fourteenth Amendment.
I am a Tulane medical or law student. Does that change the approach?
It changes almost everything. The program committee, not the university-wide office, usually decides, and the record it creates travels to residency programs, licensing boards, and bar examiners. Language matters more than outcome in some of these files, which is why negotiating the wording of a resolution is real work. See law school dismissal and academic standing.
Can I still appeal after the decision is issued?
Usually, but only within the window the policy gives you and usually only on the grounds the policy lists — procedural error, new evidence, disproportionate sanction. Appeals written as a request for mercy tend to fail; appeals that quote the policy and identify the specific departure tend to get read by someone with authority to fix it.
Related Louisiana pages: Loyola University New Orleans, Xavier University of Louisiana, and LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, all in New Orleans. The full list is on the Louisiana student defense page.
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 Louisiana; Louisiana 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.