After four years of fighting the Department of Education over campus sexual assault policies, Harvard Law has lost.

The Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced Tuesday that Harvard had violated Title IX, the provision of the 1972 Education Amendments now being used to justify colleges adjudicating felony charges of sexual assault.

OCR determined that, essentially, Harvard Law was providing its students accused of sexual assault with too many due process rights — which under the new Title IX interpretation must stop.

OCR found that Harvard Law was not adjudicating sexual harassment and sexual assault claims in a “prompt and equitable” fashion.

“In one instance, the Law School took over a year to make its final determination and the complainant was not allowed to participate in this extended appeal process, which ultimately resulted in the reversal of the initial decision to dismiss the accused student and dismissal of the complainant's complaint,” the OCR announcement said.

Basically, a student appealed Harvard Law’s “guilty” decision and won — and under the current climate of how sexual assault must be handled (i.e., accused must be found guilty) this was wrong.

So now, Harvard Law must adopt new policies, including lowering the burden of proof to “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning faculty members only have to be 50.01 percent sure an accuser is telling the truth in order to convict the accused student and ruin his or her life.

Harvard Law must also reopen all sexual harassment accusations filed during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years to “carefully scrutinize whether the Law School investigated the complaints consistent with Title IX and provide any additional remedies necessary for the complainants.” This means that students who may have been acquitted will now be retried under new policies designed to find them guilty. In a criminal court, we would call this “double jeopardy.”

These new policies, despite the promise of being “equitable” to students.

In October, 28 current and former Harvard Law faculty members — including President Obama’s mentor Charles Ogletree — denounced the changes already taken by the university in reforming its campus sexual assault policies. At the time, the faculty members wrote that the new policies lacked even “the most basic elements of fairness and due process.”

Alan Dershowitz, a self-identified liberal who signed that letter, later told the Boston Globe that the new policies “are written to preclude a defense.”

Now, Harvard Law students will be forced to live under a different set of rules than the ones they are being taught.