Patty Limerick, CU settle lawsuit over professor’s access to her work at Center for the American West

University of Colorado professor Patty Limerick announced Wednesday that she had prevailed in her intellectual property lawsuit against the Boulder campus.

Limerick — a lauded professor and historian of the American West — alleged in her lawsuit that the university restricted her access to decades worth of her documents and materials after firing her as director of the Center for the American West in 2022.

CU repeatedly has denied restricting Limerick’s access to her own scholarly material. She remains a tenured history professor at the school.

“For 40 years, Limerick was a hyperactive advocate of and ambassador for the University of Colorado,” a news release from Limerick’s attorney, Stan Garnett, stated. “Over the last two years, the university’s actions and decisions reduced her authority when it came to exercising that role. She is relieved and happy to return to the public sphere, voicing her affection for and gratitude to the faculty and students of the University of Colorado on every possible occasion.”

In May, Limerick sued CU Boulder for ownership of her scholarly work and intellectual property, claiming the university restricted access to those materials through a technicality.

In a statement Wednesday, CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Mueksch said the university maintains its position that Limerick was not barred from accessing her work.

“Professor Limerick is and will continue to be a valued tenured faculty member of the University of Colorado Boulder,” the university said in a statement that was agreed upon as part of the settlement. “The university supports Professor Limerick’s current and future academic works, including the Applied History Initiative, a program focused on educating and elevating the work of society’s young historians.”

Limerick claimed her work was restricted in the chaos of her 2022 firing after an internal investigation found the tenured academic made her staff uncomfortable by blurring the lines between her personal and professional lives, such as pressuring staff to plan her wedding.

After the firing, Limerick said she was given limited time to vacate her office and that she was not allowed back in without express university permission, which made accessing files difficult, she said. She also said she was locked out of certain documents and records and that the university “made it very difficult” to transfer her email account.

Garnett claimed CU used a “never-before-used-provision” to strip Limerick’s access through a university policy that states the institution owns materials created with substantial use of university resources. The settlement said the university can no longer say Limerick used substantial university resources to produce her work.