Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Ed., 526 U.S. 629, 15 (1999)

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Cite as: 526 U. S. 629 (1999)

Opinion of the Court

"cause[d]" the discrimination, 524 U. S., at 291; see also Canton v. Harris, supra, at 385 (recognizing that a municipality will be liable under § 1983 only if "the municipality itself causes the constitutional violation at issue" (emphasis in original)). The high standard imposed in Gebser sought to eliminate any "risk that the recipient would be liable in damages not for its own official decision but instead for its employees' independent actions." 524 U. S., at 290-291.

Gebser thus established that a recipient intentionally violates Title IX, and is subject to a private damages action, where the recipient is deliberately indifferent to known acts of teacher-student discrimination. Indeed, whether viewed as "discrimination" or "subject[ing]" students to discrimination, Title IX "[u]nquestionably . . . placed on [the Board] the duty not" to permit teacher-student harassment in its schools, Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, supra, at 75, and recipients violate Title IX's plain terms when they remain deliberately indifferent to this form of misconduct.

We consider here whether the misconduct identified in Gebser—deliberate indifference to known acts of harass-ment—amounts to an intentional violation of Title IX, capable of supporting a private damages action, when the harasser is a student rather than a teacher. We conclude that, in certain limited circumstances, it does. As an initial matter, in Gebser we expressly rejected the use of agency principles in the Title IX context, noting the textual differences between Title IX and Title VII. 524 U. S., at 283; cf. Faragher v. Boca Raton, 524 U. S. 775, 791-792 (1998) (invoking agency principles on ground that definition of "employer" in Title VII includes agents of employer); Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U. S. 57, 72 (1986) (same). Additionally, the regulatory scheme surrounding Title IX has long provided funding recipients with notice that they may be liable for their failure to respond to the discriminatory acts of certain nonagents. The Department of Education re-

643

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