A majority of the Law School’s faculty signed a letter in October urging University President Lawrence H. Summers to take legal action against the Pentagon in order to restore the pre-2002 recruiting framework.

While Summers has vehemently denounced the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and criticized the Solomon Amendment, he has repeatedly stated that the University will not take the adversarial step of filing suit against the federal government.

But last year, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR)—a network of 20 law schools—took Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to court in an effort to suspend enforcement of the Solomon Amendment.

In November, U.S. District Court Judge John C. Lifland—a 1957 graduate of Harvard Law School—denied FAIR’s motion to overturn the Pentagon’s policy.

However, FAIR cheered one part of Lifland’s opinion, in which the judge suggested that the Pentagon had misinterpreted the Solomon Amendment. But if the provision currently before the Senate becomes law, Greer said, that section of Lifland’s opinion might become moot.

The Senate bill “ends the discussions about whether the [Pentagon] regulations are authorized by the [Solomon] statute,” Greer said.

She said Rogers specifically targeted his legislation to influence the FAIR suit.

But Harvard officials believe that even if the pending legislation becomes law, the University can still hold the military to the same nondiscrimination requirement that other recruiters face.

According to Casey, the House and Senate legislation would not change Harvard’s interpretation of the Solomon Amendment.

Meanwhile, FAIR—bolstered by friend-of-the-court briefs from Harvard Law School professors and the student gay rights group Lambda—has appealed Lifland’s decision to the Third Circuit Court in Philadelphia.

In January, FAIR’s lawyers told The Crimson that a three-judge panel from the Third Circuit would hear oral arguments on the appeal in mid-March, but the Court has yet to take up the case. FAIR President Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College, wrote in an e-mail last week that the Philadelphia-based court will likely hear arguments in the suit next month.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.