Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment. Halley had taught this area for years, and she was interested to see what the university came up with. The new rules were released amid pressure from student-led groups of rape survivors and their advocates, who demanded that schools across the country do more on behalf of victims. Harvard was also responding to years of calls for change by the Obama administration. Just eight months earlier, Valerie Jarrett, a senior presidential adviser, called for a ‘‘more victim-centered’’ campus approach to dealing with the problem of sexual assault.

But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad. She worried that Harvard’s new rules would not be fair to the accused. She thought of a case she wrote about years earlier, in which a military serviceman was discharged because another serviceman complained that the man had looked into his eyes for too long in the mailroom.

At 63, Halley is a self-described feminist, but she also wrote a book in 2006 with the subtitle ‘‘How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism.’’ Throughout her legal career, she has cautioned against treating sex exclusively as a danger from which women should seek the authorities’ protection. Wielding legal power responsibly, she said, requires exploring other theories of sex and sexuality alongside feminist ideas, in order to take into account ‘‘as many interests, constituencies and uncertainties as we can acknowledge.’’ She counsels women to think twice before calling on the law to shield them. And she has urged feminists to recognize that power, and gender itself, do not always fall predictably along male and female lines. ‘‘A lot of us have been struggling to keep alive the flame of opposition within feminism,’’ she told me.

Halley spent a month laying out her concerns about Harvard’s new rules in a memo that she distributed to her law-school colleagues and to Harvard’s president. She opened by saying that colleges and universities had a special opportunity to learn from their ‘‘slipshod, dismissive and actively malign’’ handling of sexual-harassment and -assault cases in the past — a history that has been hard on victims. ‘‘But it is also a moment of danger,’’ Halley wrote, given what is at stake for students the university decides to punish. Halley, along with other Harvard law professors, was particularly concerned about complaints against male students of color.