Law Commons^™

A Law Clinic Systems Theory And The Pedagogy Of Interaction: Creating Legal Learning System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This article introduces a clinical systems approach that reframes professional experience as an interaction with a professional environment. The article encourages clinical faculty and other legal educators to contemplate the pedagogy of systemic interaction when teaching from experience and to then expand professional interactive opportunities within the short period of student participation. Clinical systems theory operates on the premise that students should reframe how they look at their surroundings so that the challenges that make up their professional system are not seen as problems but as means to a solution. Reframing by the student is realized in a clinical system …

Undo Undue Hardship: An Objective Approach To Discharging Federal Students Loans In Bankruptcy, Aaron N. Taylor

All Faculty Scholarship

A debtor seeking to discharge student loans in bankruptcy must prove that paying the debt would cause an undue hardship upon him and his dependents. Undue hardship, however, is an undefined concept, flummoxing debtors, creditors and judges alike. The result of this ambiguity is rampant inconsistency in the manners in which similarly-situated debtors (and creditors) are treated by the courts. This article argues that the undue hardship standard should be replaced by a framework that uses debt service thresholds to determine the propriety of federal student loan bankruptcy discharges. Eligibility for discharge would depend on outstanding loan amounts, debtor income …

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …

Book Review Of The Future Of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity As An Education Reform Strategy, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The last decade has seen a quiet but steady expansion of interest in using socioeconomic diversity in schools to improve educational outcomes. Ten years ago, only a few school districts around the country used formal strategies to integrate their schools along class lines. Today, over eighty school districts around the United States, together educating around four million students, ensure that poor children are taught alongside middle-class and wealthier children through a variety of voluntary integration programs. The message of The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy, the important new book edited by Richard Kahlenberg, is …

Deconstructing A Decade Of Charter School Funding Litigation: An Argument For Reform, Lisa Lukasik

Scholarly Works

For over a decade, North Carolina's charter schools and traditional public schools have been embroiled in litigation over access to local public funding. This litigation shows no sign of abatement. In fact, disputes between charter schools and traditional public schools over local funds are likely to continue until the North Carolina legislature revisits the state's charter school funding statute and modifies the means by which local funds are transferred to charter schools.

This Article deconstructs the state's charter school funding statute, the decade-long series of appellate decisions interpreting it, and the administrative and legislative responses to each appellate decision. It …

The Education Duty, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A constitution is an instrument of entrustment. By adopting a democratic constitution, a polity places in the hands of its elected representatives its trust that those representatives will act to pursue the ends of the polity, rather than their own ends, and that they will do so with an eye toward the effects of adopted policies. In effect, the polity entrusts lawmaking power to its legislature with the expectation that such power will be exercised with loyalty to the public and with due care for its interests. Simply put, legislatures are fiduciaries.

In this Article, I examine the nature of …

American School Finance Litigation And The Right To Education In South Africa, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This paper addresses the South African Constitution's invitation to the Constitutional Court to 'consider foreign law' when interpreting its provisions. Focusing on the education provisions found in section 29 of the Constitution, I make two claims. Firstly, contrary to the developing consensus, American state supreme court jurisprudence in school funding cases makes a poor resource to aid the interpretation of the basic South African right to education, regardless of the quantum of education that the Constitutional Court decides is encompassed by the word 'basic'. Secondly, however, certain aspects of these same American decisions, particularly the space they provide for a …

Regulating The Boundaries Between The Public And Private Lives Of Teachers In Changing Cultural Contexts: An American Perspective, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

Regardless of whether they wish to be regarded as such, there can be little doubt that most teachers and parents in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States agree that teachers are role models for students regardless of whether educators act in or out of schools. Yet, during this time of changing cultural contexts, the boundaries between the private and professional lives of teachers are blurred such that teachers may face liability for what they say or post in a more contemporary application of free speech, via the internet.

In light of ongoing changes, this paper examines how shifts ranging …

Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, And Urban Neighborhoods, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This paper addresses implications for urban neighborhoods of two dramatic shifts in the American educational landscape: (1) the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods, and (2) the rise of charter schools. In previous studies, we linked Catholic school closures to increased disorder and crime, and decreased social cohesion, in Chicago neighborhoods. This paper turns to two questions unanswered in our previous investigations. First, because we focused exclusively on school closures in our previous studies, we were uncertain whether our results reflected the work that open Catholic schools do as neighborhood institutions or whether we were finding a “loss …