ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit in which five University System of Georgia professors were challenging a 2017 law that removed public college and university campuses as "school safety zones" where guns were banned.
In an opinion released Wednesday, the state's highest court essentially held that later campus weapons policy instituted by the university system's Board of Regents closely mirrored the 2017 law, making the lawsuit moot.
The professors, in their suit, had argued that the policy change was effectively coerced by the passage of the 2017 law.
But the Supreme Court held that the central consideration was only whether the law encroached on the Board of Regents' authority to govern the university system.
"In determining that this action by the Board moots the professors’ challenge to the 2017 amendment, we do not concern ourselves with why the Board took this action,” Justice John J. Ellington wrote for the unanimous decision. "We do not look behind the exercise of government power to determine the subjective reasons — legal, political, or otherwise — for a particular action, so long as the action was within the government actor’s authority. … Here, what matters is not why the Board adopted the policy in question, but merely that it did do so."
A Fulton County court originally ruled against the professors on several grounds, including that they didn't have standing and that their suit was barred by sovereign immunity.
“Because the complaint shows that the Board adopted gun-carrying policies consistent with the 2017 statutory amendment, the question of whether the amendment usurped the constitutional authority of the Board to govern, control, and manage the USG and its member institutions became moot,” the decision states. “Consequently, the trial court lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate the professors’ as-applied challenge, and we affirm the judgment dismissing the professors’ complaint on that basis alone.