Key Takeaways
- Courts reviewing university vaccine requirements have generally applied rational basis review, a deferential test that most mandates with medical and religious exemptions pass.
- In Klaassen, the Seventh Circuit and Justice Barrett both declined to block Indiana University's 2021 COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
- Most universities have dropped COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and a 2025 executive order seeks to deny certain federal funds to schools that still require them.
Can a university require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of coming to campus? In the summer of 2021, hundreds of colleges said yes, and students went to court.
In this TalksOnLaw Brief, Dorit Reiss, Professor of Law and the James Edgar Hervey '50 Chair of Litigation at UC Law San Francisco and a leading scholar of vaccine law, explains how university mandates worked and how a federal court analyzed the challenge to Indiana University's policy.
Campus Mandates and the Klaassen Challenge
Professor Reiss explains that university policies varied: some waited for full FDA licensure, some required vaccination immediately with broad exemptions until licensure, and all she had seen offered medical and religious exemptions, though their strictness differed. In Klaassen v. Trustees of Indiana University, eight students challenged Indiana University's mandate on constitutional grounds and argued that a vaccine under emergency use authorization could not be required. Six already had religious exemptions, she notes; their challenge also targeted the testing and masking required of exempt students. For unvaccinated students without an exemption, the consequences were close to expulsion.
Jacobson and Rational Basis Review
The district court rejected the university's argument that no right was at stake, Professor Reiss explains, because the right to refuse medical treatment is a liberty interest. But there is no fundamental right to attend a university unvaccinated, so the court applied rational basis review, asking whether the mandate was reasonable, rather than strict scrutiny. The court read Jacobson v. Massachusetts as applying an equivalent reasonableness test and found later case law pointed the same way. It did not squarely decide the emergency use question, though upholding the mandate suggested an answer.
State Laws Limiting Mandates
Whether state anti-mandate laws reach universities, she says, depends on their wording. Laws barring government agencies from requiring vaccines for services may or may not cover a state university, while laws extending to businesses likely would. Indiana's law barred requiring documentation rather than vaccination, so the university accepted students' own attestations.
What to Know Now
Indiana University's mandate survived. In August 2021, the Seventh Circuit declined to enjoin it, stressing the available exemptions, and Justice Barrett denied the students' emergency application. The Pfizer vaccine received full approval that month, removing the emergency use argument for later challenges. As the pandemic waned, most universities ended their COVID-19 requirements, and in February 2025 Executive Order 14214 directed a plan to end federal discretionary funding for schools and universities that require COVID-19 vaccination for in-person attendance. Universities continue to require other vaccines, such as measles and meningitis, under state law. The rational basis framework Professor Reiss describes still governs most challenges, although some judges have argued that Jacobson should be read more narrowly, so the debate over its reach continues.
