John C. Clune

Universities rarely lack rules. What goes missing, at the moment of need, is the willingness to use them, and John C. Clune builds his cases in the gap between the authority a university holds on paper and the authority it exercises. For nearly twenty-five years he has represented people standing across from concentrated institutional power: students facing their own universities, crime victims facing indifferent processes, athletes facing the governing bodies that set the terms of their sport. As chair of the Sports Law Group at Hutchinson Black and Cook in Boulder, his practice joins Title IX, sexual-abuse litigation, athlete safety, and sports law, and his cases have repeatedly redrawn the working meaning of campus accountability.

From the prosecution table to the victim’s side

Clune earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in 1992 and his law degree from Gonzaga University in 1996, then began as a criminal prosecutor, rising to Chief Deputy District Attorney for Colorado’s Fifth Judicial District. Prosecution taught him the criminal courts from the inside; it also showed him how easily the person at the center of a case could become peripheral to it. He moved to the other side of that line, representing the young woman at the center of the Kobe Bryant case, one of the most scrutinized victim-representation matters in the country, and went on to co-found the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center, serving as its first legal director and building a pro bono practice devoted to enforcing the participatory rights of crime victims. His later clients have included Deborah Ramirez during the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings and multiple survivors in litigation against Harvey Weinstein, for whom he was lead counsel. In 2019 the National Crime Victim Bar Association gave him its Frank Carrington Champion of Civil Justice Award.

What a Title IX remedy can reach

Clune’s campus cases mapped the full reach of Title IX’s remedies. He represented Erica Kinsman in her widely followed Title IX action against Florida State University; the $950,000 resolution also bound the university to five years of prevention, training, and transparency measures. For a University of Oregon survivor he negotiated an $800,000 settlement that included four years of tuition and housing and a policy governing the transfer records of disciplined athletes. His client in the Baylor University suit resolved in 2017 was a former student whose case formed part of the reckoning over the university’s handling of sexual assault during its football program’s rise, and he has since brought Title IX class actions against Stephen F. Austin State University and Concordia University Irvine over the elimination of women’s athletic opportunities, obtaining rulings that enforce the statute’s participation requirements.

The terms are deliberate. Money compensates, but the structural terms change campuses: a survivor’s education restored, a university’s disclosure practices rewritten, an athlete’s move to a new school stripped of hidden risk. His clients almost always sued to make the school different for the next student, and his settlements are drafted to deliver exactly that.

The question at the campus gate

The University of Arizona litigation put the doctrinal question of his career squarely before the federal courts: where does a university’s responsibility end? Clune’s team represented Lida DeGroote in a Title IX action arising from abuse by an Arizona football player, reaching a public settlement in September 2020 after the court concluded the record could support trial on aspects of the institutional-response claim. When a separate suit by Mackenzie Brown, involving later violence by the same player, reached the en banc Ninth Circuit, Clune appeared for the National Women’s Law Center and thirty-one other organizations as amici. On September 25, 2023, the en banc court held that a reasonable factfinder could find the university exercised substantial control over both the student and the off-campus context, reviving the case and setting out a framework for student-on-student harassment claims. The ruling gave practical shape to a principle Clune had pressed for years: a school’s responsibility does not end at the campus gate when teams, disciplinary powers, and school-created relationships define the environment where harm occurs.

Equality in the new economics of college sports

Clune has now carried Title IX into the largest structural change college athletics has undergone. In January 2025, he and co-counsel objected on behalf of ten current and former female athletes to the proposed settlement in House v. NCAA, the antitrust case that created a $2.8 billion back-pay fund and a forward-looking system of direct athlete payments. The objection is precise: the settlement allocates about ninety percent of past damages to men in football and basketball on the premise that schools would have paid men that share had the rules allowed, when Title IX would have required money from a school or conference to be paid equitably; most female athletes would receive $125 for each year of eligibility, and the objectors put the resulting shortfall to women at $1.1 billion. The district court approved the settlement in June 2025. The female athletes appealed, with Clune as lead appellate counsel; the Ninth Circuit consolidated the final-approval appeals, briefing was completed in early 2026, and the case awaits argument, with back-pay distributions held while the forward-looking revenue-sharing framework begins. It poses a question that will shape the economics of women’s sports for a generation.

The fluency of both sides

As chair of the Sports Law Group, Clune works daily with the institutions of organized sport — universities, teams, governing bodies, athletes — in eligibility disputes, disciplinary proceedings, and governance fights, and that fluency is what he brings to the person standing across from all that concentrated power. He knows how the rules operate long before any dispute reaches a courtroom: who holds disciplinary authority, how transfer records move, where a governing body’s discretion lives. His survivor and athlete cases turn that knowledge outward.

At every stage since the Colorado prosecutor’s office, Clune has put the same question to a powerful institution: you had the authority; why didn’t you use it? The settlements that rebuilt his clients’ educations, the appellate law that extended a university’s responsibility beyond its gates, and the pending challenge to how a new athletic economy pays its women all descend from that question, asked case after case until the university, the conference, or the NCAA answers.