On September 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit handed The Deborah Project a substantial victory in Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, Nos. 24-7676 & 25-3436 (9th Cir. Sept. 4, 2026). The panel — Judges Lee, Bumatay, and Sung — affirmed the dismissal of the operative complaint for lack of standing, but reversed the district court's refusal to allow another amendment and vacated both the anti-SLAPP order and the attorney's fee award entered against the plaintiffs.
The bottom line: the case is alive, the plaintiffs get to plead again, and the six-figure fee judgment is gone.
Why it matters
Three parts of the memorandum matter well beyond this case:
- The claims are ripe. The district court treated the case as premature because LAUSD never formally adopted the Consortium's curriculum. The panel's answer: actual classroom use is enough. Two LAUSD teachers using the challenged curriculum makes the dispute a present one.
- Direct exposure is not the price of admission. The panel rejected the defendants' sweeping standing theory, holding that plaintiffs need not allege they or their children sat in a classroom where the curriculum was taught. A personally suffered harm causally linked to the curriculum's spread — for example, antisemitic bullying connected to its use — can supply the injury.
- Dismissal with prejudice was an abuse of discretion. The plaintiffs identified amendments that could cure the standing defects, including that the curriculum has proliferated since 2022 and that their children have suffered related antisemitic acts at school. Because leave to amend should have been granted, the anti-SLAPP strike order and the fee award fall with it.
The panel also left a much larger question hanging: whether California's anti-SLAPP attorney's-fee provision can still apply in federal court after the Supreme Court's recent decision in Berk v. Choy. The threat of a six-figure fee award has done more to deter these cases than any merits ruling, and the Ninth Circuit has now put on the record that the foundation of that threat may not survive.
What happens next
The case returns to the district court for an amended complaint that shows the curriculum's spread and connects specific antisemitic incidents suffered by the plaintiffs or their children to that spread. The court's message to the community is plain: the reason the last complaint failed is that no one had come forward with the incident connecting the curriculum to a child — and the reason it can now be fixed is that families documented what their children experienced at school. That is what wins these cases.