In French public higher education, discipline is governed by the Education Code (Code de l'éducation), which sets the scale of sanctions, the composition of the disciplinary bodies and the routes of appeal to the administrative courts. It has produced a dense body of case law and a good deal of commentary [1]. Discipline in private institutions has been studied very little. It is a matter of contract: the school's internal regulations (règlement intérieur) serve as the law of the parties, subject to the mandatory general principles of law. That scarcity is surprising, given how often sanctions are imposed and what they do to a student's studies.

A word on that divide, for readers abroad. Public universities are State institutions, and French law reserves the title of "university" for them. The private sector covers most business schools, a number of engineering schools, the Catholic institutes and a wide range of specialist schools; it teaches more than one student in four (26.5% in 2024-25). Some of these schools are recognized by the State, and some award degrees that carry a State stamp. The student's relationship with the school remains a contract, entered into on registration and paid for in tuition fees. International students have a particular stake in the matter: France hosted 443,500 of them in 2024-25, and business schools, most of them private, took 15%, the fastest growth of any category over five years.

I. Before the disciplinary board

In the closing sequence of Scent of a Woman (Martin Brest, 1992, a remake of Dino Risi's Profumo di donna, 1974), Charlie Simms appears before the disciplinary committee of Baird, an exclusive New Hampshire prep school that grooms its pupils for Harvard. A witness to the prank that humiliated the headmaster, the scholarship student has refused to give up the names of his classmates. Trask, the headmaster targeted by the prank, who had offered Charlie a recommendation to Harvard in exchange for informing, runs the hearing, levels the accusation and calls for expulsion. Then Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, played by Al Pacino, rises, speaks up for the student and turns the assembly: "I say you are executing his soul!" Charlie is cleared.

Under the Hollywood bombast, the scene gathers the pathologies that the disciplinary boards of private institutions still produce: a head of school who sits as judge in his own cause, a summons that takes care to leave the charges unspecified, a sanction out of all proportion to the misconduct, a student alone before the institution. French law arms the student whom the school means to sanction, at two distinct moments: the appearance before the board, where the student's case is built and where the regularity of the internal procedure is decided, then review by the court, once the sanction has been imposed. The first phase is governed by the right to a fair hearing and by the impartiality that the internal regulations put into effect; the second opens an action before the civil courts, whose review is measured by substantive safeguards and proportionality.

A. Legal assistance and the right to a fair hearing

In 2026, I saw two students in turn, summoned by two different schools. At the first, the regulations ruled out assistance by a lawyer; I prepared the student's case and stayed away from the hearing. The board's first question was: "Why didn't you bring a lawyer?" At the second, the regulations allowed it, and I was present. The board's last question was: "But why did you hire a lawyer?" Absence of counsel feeds suspicion, and its presence feeds it just as much. Either way the student is faulted for the manner of defending the case, which says a good deal about how these bodies relate to the very principle they are supposed to guarantee.

Positive law tempers that ambivalence. The disciplinary board of a private institution is not a court. Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights therefore stays out of the picture, and the right to be assisted by a lawyer depends on the internal regulations, which the school drafts as it sees fit [2]. Whatever rule is adopted, the board must set out the charges in detail, give the student access to the file and leave time to prepare a response [3].

These rights are of constitutional rank: the Constitutional Council (Conseil constitutionnel) has enshrined them as a fundamental principle recognized by the laws of the Republic, applicable to any procedure, disciplinary proceedings included. The summons offers the clearest illustration.

In Versailles, the Court of Appeal set aside a permanent exclusion where the summons did no more than refer to an earlier warning, without setting out the facts, and so deprived the student of any effective means of answering [4]. A summons that fails to specify the charges verges on the Kafkaesque: the accused is never even told what the accusation is. The Rennes Court of Appeal, in upholding the suspension of a sanction, added the failure to make the file available, the missing record of the board's meeting and the unknown composition of the body [5]. For proceedings that do fall under Article 6, the European Court of Human Rights takes the same view of the failure to disclose an adverse document before the decision (ECtHR, 18 February 2010, Baccichetti v. France, no. 22584/06).

B. Impartiality and procedural fairness

The requirement of impartiality means that the disciplinary body can be neither composed of nor led by a person who has a personal interest in the dispute or who played a decisive part in establishing the facts.

As to the composition of the panel, the Paris Court of Appeal set aside the sanctions imposed by a private lycée (upper secondary school) because the teacher who had complained sat on the board with a vote. She had supervised the examinations, asked for the hearing, reported the facts in vehement terms and demanded a suspension, then took part in the deliberations. The court found her "personally interested in the decision to come" and held that the sanctions had not been imposed at the end of a procedure meeting the requirements of impartiality and fairness [6]. A minimum rule follows: the board excludes any member with a direct interest, whether the teacher who claims to be the victim, the author of the central report, or the person who asked for the board to be convened while displaying a settled view on the sanction.

As to the conduct of the investigation, the Versailles Court of Appeal adds a second layer. A business school had adopted a "Respect for Others Policy" (Politique du Respect d'Autrui), which set up an investigation unit entrusted to a pair of investigators, to guarantee neutrality. In practice, a single person conducted the investigation. Of the twelve witness statements the student produced, three led to an interview; the nine other witnesses were never contacted. The school had failed to follow its own rule in one of its essential aspects, the presence of two separate people at the interviews to ensure neutrality and impartiality. In that failure the court saw a manifestly unlawful disturbance [7]. An institution that has given itself a neutrality procedure must apply it to the letter, on pain of suspension or annulment.

Scent of a Woman offers the extreme version. Trask is the target of the prank, the accuser, the lead investigator and the de facto judge of the assembly: every function united in one offended man. Nemo judex in causa sua. To the breach of impartiality is added a breach of fairness: the bargain offered to Charlie (a recommendation to Harvard in exchange for names) and the pressure that breaks George, ordered by his father and the headmaster to name his classmates. A sanction resting on an extorted confession would run up against the principle, extended by the Constitutional Council to disciplinary matters, that no one is bound to incriminate himself (Cons. const., 8 December 2023, no. 2023-1074 QPC).

Last, the board must match the sanction to the gravity of the misconduct, a requirement whose effective review belongs to the court.

II. Going to court

Once the sanction has been imposed, the student may challenge it in court. Three questions guide that challenge: which court, how intense a review, which remedies.

A. The jurisdiction of the civil courts

The administrative courts decline jurisdiction over disciplinary measures taken against pupils and students of private educational institutions, including those bound to the State by contract. While carrying out a public-service mission, the heads of those institutions hold no public-authority prerogative in disciplinary matters; the sanctions they impose fall outside the category of administrative acts and outside the action for annulment (recours pour excès de pouvoir) (Conseil d'État, France's highest administrative court, 26 May 2004, no. 259682).

A challenge to the discipline of students registered at a private higher education institution therefore belongs, as a matter of principle, to the civil courts. The CNESER, the National Council for Higher Education and Research (at the time the appeal body for university disciplinary boards, a role it has kept only to a very limited extent since a law of 6 August 2019), declared that it had no jurisdiction over appeals against the sanctions of a private institution [8].

One reservation concerns certain kinds of fraud. Article R. 811-11 of the Education Code makes the disciplinary procedure for students of public higher education institutions applicable to fraud committed at a private institution where registration gives access to an examination of public higher education, or on the occasion of an examination leading to a national degree (diplôme national). For such facts, the sanctions of Article R. 811-37 (a ban on taking an examination or on registering at a public institution) carry effects that exceed the ordinary powers of a private institution and rest on public-authority prerogatives. Challenging them is a matter for the administrative courts.

The practical test is the sanction that is in fact imposed. Where the institution confines itself to a contractual measure (voiding its own examinations, refusing to re-register the student), no public-authority prerogative is in play and the tribunal judiciaire, the civil court of general jurisdiction, keeps the case, even if the fraud touches a national degree. The situation is common: a student sanctioned for plagiarism in a master's examination, by a sanction limited to refusal of re-registration at the private institution, comes before the tribunal judiciaire. The line moves when the school relies on Article R. 811-37. Jurisdiction then turns on the nature of the sanction imposed, whatever label is put on the misconduct.

B. The intensity of review: substantive safeguards and proportionality

The civil court reviews whether the internal procedure complied with the safeguards that the regulations put into effect. An irregularity affecting a substantive safeguard makes the sanction unlawful and exposes it to annulment [9]. Impartiality and the adversarial principle, examined above, are among them. Proportionality ranks alongside them.

The disciplinary boards of private higher education institutions are required, by the mandatory general principles of law that frame their contractual freedom, to impose sanctions proportionate to the gravity of the misconduct [10].

Proportionality is assessed by reference to the gravity of the breach of the internal regulations, its consequences and the character of the person who committed it [11]. In a case decided in Lille in 2025, a third-year undergraduate with no prior record, who had taken part in the theft of drinks of small value (the institution having failed to document the amount of the loss), had been sanctioned by temporary exclusion. The court found the measure manifestly disproportionate, saw in it a manifestly unlawful disturbance and ordered its suspension, together with immediate reinstatement subject to a daily penalty for non-compliance.

A sanction's effect on the student's studies carries great weight: a six-month exclusion brings "an abrupt and certain halt to the course of study" [12]. For a student who holds a French student residence permit, more is at stake, since renewal depends on registration at an institution and on proof that the studies are real and serious (attendance, examinations taken, results). So where formal regularity is open to debate and no manifest breach appears, the imminent harm to the course of study is enough on its own to justify suspension. The Lyon Court of Appeal suspended a ban on registration for the third year, a measure that shut out of the course a student who held the required results, pending judgment on the merits [13].

Scent of a Woman closes the loop. Slade carries the assembly by moving the debate from what Charlie did to what the sanction will destroy. The court does the same when it measures the damage to the course of study. And the comparison completes the demonstration: to exclude Charlie for keeping silent when George, who talked, escapes any sanction is a penalty out of proportion to the misconduct, one that rewards informing.

C. Strategic routes and remedies

Two routes are open before the civil courts. The judge hearing urgent applications (juge des référés) may order the suspension of the sanction and the reinstatement of the student where there is a manifestly unlawful disturbance or imminent harm (Article 835 of the Code of Civil Procedure). As the party that started the procedure, the institution bears the burden of showing that the sanction is regular and lawful [14]. On the merits, the court may annul the sanction and order it removed from the student's file. Which route to choose depends on urgency and on the remedy sought: a fast protective measure, or a final annulment.

Review on appeal follows a substantive logic: appeal courts overturn refusals as readily as they uphold suspensions, according to the gravity of the procedural breaches and the concrete impact on the course of study.

There remains the double question that the disciplinary boards put to my two clients, mentioned above ("Why did you bring a lawyer?" and "Why didn't you bring a lawyer?"). The tribunal judiciaire spends no time on it. It checks that the charges were specified, that the file was disclosed, that no one judged his own cause, that the sanction fits the misconduct. Those requirements weigh on the institution, which has to justify the regularity of what it imposed.

Defending a student comes down to four reflexes. Have the school produce its internal regulations. Target the substantive safeguards, whose breach the courts punish most firmly. Document the impact on the student's studies: internship, final oral examination, degree, the impossibility of changing course once registrations have closed, and, for an international student, the residence permit. Choose the route: summary proceedings for a fast protective measure, the merits for an annulment with removal from the file.

The lawyer puzzles the disciplinary board by being there, which is taken as an escalation, and by staying away, which is read as nonchalance. Since the institution's sympathy is lost in advance, one may as well make sure of being defended. Before the tribunal judiciaire, the student becomes a litigant like any other again, and the student's counsel a lawyer like any other.

Notes

CA: cour d'appel (court of appeal). TJ: tribunal judiciaire.

[1] https://braun-avocat.com/en/disciplinary-council/  [2] CA Versailles, 4 July 2024, no. 23/08208; 6 May 2025, no. 22/00228. [3] CA Versailles, 6 May 2025, no. 22/00228; CA Rennes, 30 November 2021, no. 21/03214. [4] CA Versailles, 6 May 2025, no. 22/00228. [5] CA Rennes, 30 November 2021, no. 21/03214. [6] CA Paris, pôle 4, ch. 9, 24 November 2011, no. 09/21225. [7] CA Versailles, 4 July 2024, no. 23/08208. [8] CNESER, 7 March 2016, no. 1204, Bulletin officiel de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, no. 16, 22 April 2016. [9] CA Versailles, 6 May 2025, no. 22/00228. [10] CA Rennes, 30 November 2021, no. 21/03214; CA Versailles, 4 July 2024, no. 23/08208, and 6 May 2025, no. 22/00228; TJ Lille, 16 September 2025, no. 25/01325. [11] TJ Lille, 16 September 2025, no. 25/01325. [12] CA Rennes, 30 November 2021, no. 21/03214. [13] CA Lyon, 8th ch., 6 July 2022, no. 22/04506. [14] TJ Lille, 16 September 2025, no. 25/01325.

First published in French on Village de la Justice, 21 August 2026.