For much of the past decade, at Harvard Law School, I have welcomed a crop of new law students to campus each fall with an orientation speech warning them that the time for youthful indiscretions is over; it is now the first day of their professional lives. I admonish them not to engage in any conduct that they might later be tempted to lie about to get a job, and note that F.B.I. background checks are routine for lawyers seeking positions of trust. Though I’ve wondered about instilling this level of anxiety in students, many of them will later face scrutiny as public officials.

Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh internalized such a stern professional message, in law school and later, as a religious and conservative lawyer. The current scandal surrounding the Supreme Court nominee involves events that allegedly took place while he was in high school, at Georgetown Prep, and in college, at Yale. On Sunday, The New Yorker reported that, in addition to Christine Blasey Ford—who has accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape during a party in high school, and is set to testify at a hearing on Thursday—a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, has come forward with sexual-assault allegations, saying that, in a drinking game at Yale during their freshman year, Kavanaugh put his penis in her face and caused her to touch it without her consent. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

Ramirez’s story has made clear that Kavanaugh’s fate as a Supreme Court nominee may well turn on the questions raised in today’s campus sexual-assault debates. Both Ford and Ramirez’s accounts share many classic elements of campus assault stories, including, most saliently, the role of alcohol. Ford claims that Kavanaugh was “stumbling drunk” when he assaulted her. Ramirez says that her memories contain gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In campus cases, alcohol-related memory gaps of the alleged victims, the accused, and witnesses often pose challenges for determining what happened and whether someone is responsible. The difficulty of determining facts has troubled educational institutions. As the Republican senator Lindsey Graham said to USA Today, “What am I supposed to do? Go ahead and ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation?”

Remarkably, both Ford and Ramirez’s allegations involve other students who saw, and encouraged, the assaults. Ford identified Kavanaugh’s high-school classmate Mark Judge as alternately laughing and yelling “Go for it” and “Stop” while Kavanaugh attacked her. Judge’s college girlfriend has questioned the credibility of his denial, telling The New Yorker that he had confided in her that he and a group of friends took turns having sex with a drunk woman while at Georgetown Prep. The New Yorker’s interviews of Kavanaugh and Ramirez’s Yale classmates revealed conflicting perceptions of whether the event that she alleged occurred and whether Kavanaugh was responsible. Though it is unusual for sexual assaults to have firsthand witnesses, it is typical for friends to be interviewed in campus assault investigations, and for loyalties and betrayals to both tear friend groups apart and hang over factual recollections. With respect to the Kavanaugh allegations, in deciding what to say, the friends also had reasons for concern about their own reputations, as bystanders or participants; Judge may even have criminal liability as an accomplice to the alleged assault.

Negotiations over the terms of Thursday’s planned hearing have echoed but also torqued the arguments on how to insure that campus procedures provide fairness and produce accuracy. The question of who should investigate the allegations has been especially contentious. In the campus sexual-assault debate, advocates for victims have been skeptical of involving law enforcement—because of its historical neglect of sexual assault, and a general assumption that police often mishandle sexual-assault complaints—and tend to have more faith in university officers and procedures. Ford, Ramirez, and congressional Democrats, however, have so little confidence in the Republican-led Senate-confirmation process that they have called for investigations by the F.B.I. The F.B.I. normally conducts background checks of nominees, as it has of Kavanaugh, so it would be logical for the F.B.I. to continue its work by systematically interviewing all potential witnesses and gathering facts that the Senate would consider. As many observers have noted, this is what happened in 1991, when, after the scheduled hearings for Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation were completed, Anita Hill came forward with her sexual-harassment allegation.

For Ford’s Senate hearing, there has been disagreement over who should question her to draw out and test her story—the all-male Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee or a third-party female lawyer. Ford has insisted on the senators, saying that questioning by an outside lawyer could create a prosecutorial tone. But, in general, victims’ advocates have tended to prefer that questioning of alleged victims be conducted by neutral people, rather than by individuals known to be unfriendly partisans. Here, several Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, including Graham and Orrin Hatch, have publicly expressed their commitment to believing Kavanaugh over Ford, or to confirming him, come what may. And the Senate’s poor record with questioning Hill should cause nervousness about having Republican senators question Ford. In the abstract, it would seem most fair to Ford to have her questioned by a neutral person, but her request to engage with the senators directly should not be denied.

The Kavanaugh allegations also highlight the emerging consciousness on campuses of bystanders’ responsibility. Ford’s lawyers and Senate Democrats have called for Kavanaugh’s alleged witness and accomplice, Mark Judge, to testify. College students now commonly receive training on how to intervene if they see a situation that is fraught with risk, such as a student who is severely drunk at a party accompanying another to a private place. As the #MeToo movement gains momentum, people who are not victims or perpetrators but may know of sexual misconduct have been increasingly criticized for complicity. Kavanaugh himself had to answer questions in his first hearings, earlier this month, about the sexual misconduct of his friend, the former judge Alex Kozinski, for whom he clerked. Surely, Democratic senators alleged, Kavanaugh must have been aware of Kozinski’s behavior. (Kavanaugh denied it.) Expanding bystanders’ liability—even if the consequences are merely reputational, rather than disciplinary or criminal—may complicate the project of finding out the truth of what happened. What Judge and other friends in high school and college saw or knew about Kavanaugh may be obscured by the risks that they know they may bear.

As with sexual-assault hearings at high schools and universities, the emphasis of the Kavanaugh hearing will be less about potential punishment for Kavanaugh or justice for the alleged victims than about the interests and legitimacy of institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court and the Senate. In that context, without orderly safeguards—such as a full professional investigation, familiar rules of evidence, or clear-cut due-process protections for either side—this attempt to determine Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct as a student may feel destabilizing, prurient, and unfair. (We heard the nominee say in a Fox News interview, on Monday night, that he remained a virgin for years after the alleged incidents, which unfortunately could lead to a debate about the truth of that claim at the coming hearing.) But it is giving the public a crash course in what universities face every day in deciding how to hear and evaluate accusations among students, with campus administrators having to know far more details than they might want to about the sexual behavior of the students in their charge.

Perhaps law school is too late for a warning about the future scrutiny of one’s conduct. One of the lessons of Kavanaugh’s nomination has been that public officials may need to answer for their entire history. In his television interview, Kavanaugh said, “I think everyone is judged on their whole life.” The public will judge his alleged behavior, but, perhaps even more confidently, they will judge a loutish culture of drunken fraternities, preppy privilege, and reckless sexism among teen-age boys that we have historically tended to overlook, and for which Kavanaugh has become a timely poster child.