University of Nevada, Las Vegas Student Defense Lawyer
Students reach me about UNLV in one of a few recognizable ways. A course instructor refers an assignment to the academic integrity process because a similarity report or an AI-detection score came back high. A conduct charge arrives out of a residence hall, a party, or an incident that the university learned about from someone other than the student. Or a college — dental, medical, law, nursing — tells a student that academic standing or professionalism is under review, which is a different problem with different consequences. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is the state’s largest university, with nearly 34,000 students and a Carnegie R1 research designation, and its size means the process a student walks into is a system rather than a conversation with a professor.
Overview
UNLV is a public institution, and that fact does real work. The Fourteenth Amendment applies to it, so a disciplinary suspension requires notice of what the school says you did and a meaningful opportunity to respond before the sanction takes effect, under Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975). Longer separations require more process, not less.
Academic judgments are treated differently. Under 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), courts give substantial deference to a faculty’s evaluation of academic performance. That deference is the reason the label on your case matters so much, and it is also the reason the strongest arguments in an academic case are usually procedural: whether the university followed the process it published, whether the record supports the finding, and whether the decision was actually an academic judgment or a disciplinary one wearing an academic label.
Where UNLV cases come from
Large-enrollment courses with online components generate the highest volume of integrity referrals, and a growing share of those rest on software output rather than on anything a person observed. Conduct matters come out of housing, student organizations, and off-campus incidents the university learns about secondhand.
Then there are the professional schools, where the stakes change entirely. UNLV houses the School of Dental Medicine, the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, and the William S. Boyd School of Law — the state’s only dental program, one of Nevada’s two MD programs, and Nevada’s only law school. Each runs its own academic standing and professionalism review on top of the university-wide system, and a finding in any of them is read later by licensing boards, residency programs, and bar examiners rather than by a dean who has moved on.
Which process you are in matters
UNLV routes academic integrity allegations, student conduct charges, Title IX complaints, and academic standing decisions through different offices, on different timelines, with different decision-makers and different appeal rights. The track determines how much process you get and what an advisor is permitted to do. Identify yours before you write a word: academic integrity, student conduct, or a college-level academic or professionalism review. Because UNLV is public, the constitutional floor described at due process at public institutions applies underneath whatever the code promises.
What to do first
Find the current code on UNLV’s own site rather than relying on any summary, including this one. Office names, web addresses, and procedures at large universities change from year to year, and the version that governs your case is the one in effect for your cohort and your charge. Then write the deadline down, request your file, and preserve your drafting history, cloud version records, group chats, and email before any of it is purged. Do not give a statement or sit for an interview until you understand what the university claims to have. Investigators routinely add a separate charge for dishonesty during the process, and that charge is often easier to prove than the original allegation.
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 UNLV 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 allow counsel to participate, some allow an advisor who may not speak, and some allow no outside person in the room at all. Reading the policy currently in force is the first step, and it determines what form the assistance can take.
Common questions
I am in the Kerkorian School of Medicine or the dental school. Is that different from an undergraduate case?
Substantially. In a health-professions program the sanction is rarely a suspension — it is remediation, a repeated year, a professionalism notation, or dismissal, and each of those is disclosed later to residency programs and to state licensing boards. The wording of the resolution, not the student’s explanation of it, is what gets read. See medical school dismissal and remediation.
Does a Boyd School of Law finding follow me to bar admission?
Character and fitness questionnaires ask about academic and disciplinary findings, and law schools are asked to confirm what the applicant reported. That is why the negotiation over language and notation at the school stage often matters more than it appears to at the time. See law school dismissal and academic standing.
The evidence against me is an AI-detection score. Is that enough?
It depends on what the policy requires and on what the report actually says. These tools produce probabilistic output, not observations, and their documentation frequently contains limitations that the referral does not mention. The first task is to obtain the full report rather than the summary figure, and the second is to compare what the vendor claims against what the charge asserts.
Related Nevada pages: University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada State University, College of Southern Nevada, Touro University Nevada, and Roseman University of Health Sciences. The statewide overview is at Nevada student defense, and the flat-fee record review is described on the fees and scope of services 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 Nevada; Nevada 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.