Education Law Commons^™

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …

Get Educated: Ask, Tell, And Say Gay, Matthew Oster

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

On July 6, 1999, Private Barry Winchell was murdered in his sleep by a fellow soldier for dating a transgender woman. Superiors were aware that Private Winchell was being harassed for dating a transgender woman but took no action to stop it. U.S. Department of Defense Directive 1304.26, commonly referred to as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (“DADT”), was the policy for the United States military for nearly two decades beginning in 1993. A policy meant to protect “unit cohesion” instead itself engendered hatred and violence among servicemembers. Unfortunately, government-sanctioned discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community did not end with the …

An "Exceedingly Persuasive Justification": Affirmative Action As Protected By The Free Exercise Clause, Kristin O'Bryan Pereira

Pepperdine Law Review

In 2023, the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard (SFFA) decision effectively outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action programs in higher education, holding that such programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile, the current Supreme Court has been unprecedently friendly to claimants seeking Free Exercise Clause protection from government restraints on religious exercise. The intersection between these two areas of law has implications for a category of schools not explicitly considered in the SFFA decision—private, religious schools …

In The Age Of Garcetti: Public Teachers' Free Speech Rights Within The Transgender-Student Debates, Hannah Bradvica

Pepperdine Law Review

A culture war over gender identity is playing out on the school playground, as conservative lawmakers across the country have introduced and implemented various pieces of anti-trans legislation focused on stripping away the privacy and expression of transgender students’ identities. An important question within this legislation remains: may public school teachers be exempt from following these policies? This Comment examines teachers’ free speech rights within two contexts: mandated parental notification of transgender-student policies and guidelines requiring teachers to adhere to students’ preferred pronouns. It considers the viability of compelled-speech claims brought by teachers, applying First Amendment jurisprudence and Garcetti v. …

The Limitation Effect: Florida Restrictions As A National Warning Sign, Mica Pollock, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, John Diaz, Abigail Richburg, Blair Cox, Andrew Matschiner, Emilie Homan, Abdul-Rehman Mohammed Issa

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The abstract below summarizes a white paper report we released in fall 2024, The Limitation Effect: Experiences of State Policy-Driven Education Restriction in Florida’s Public Schools (Pollock & Yoshikawa, et al.,). We hope readers will read our report in full. It links to an archive of background information and full interview highlights, as well.

At this writing, the nation has experienced over four years of a divisive networked campaign to restrict how educators can support students in public schools. This campaign has promoted both state law and nationally networked local agitation demanding that public schools limit access to specific realms …

Brief For Petitioner St. Isidore Of Seville Catholic Virtual School, John A. Meiser, Meredith H. Kessler, Michael R. Perri, Socorro A. Dooley, Michael H. Mcginley, Steven A. Engel, Brian A. Kulp, Anthony R. Jadick, Julia M. Fitzgerald, Cory J. Kopicki

Court Briefs

Nos. 24-396, 24-394
St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Gentner Drummond

On Writ of Certiorari to the Oklahoma Supreme Court

From the Summary of Argument

The decision below contravenes the Constitution and this Court’s precedents several times over. It spurned the free exercise guarantees this Court has repeatedly upheld. It violated the state-action doctrine by treating a privately run religious school as an arm of the government. And it distorted the Establishment Clause beyond recognition.

Why Top Law Schools Have Fewer Women Law Professors, Kimberly Coleman

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Countless individuals have made remarkable strides in advancing equality, but the work is far from over, especially for women in the legal field. Iowa set an early precedent by admitting Arabella Mansfield to the bar in 1869, and pioneers like Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett became the first American women law instructors in 1896. Yet, despite these breakthroughs, systemic barristers persisted. Dr. Eleanor T. Glueck, despite attending law school in 1928 to research criminology and holding a doctorate in education, was never able to hold a teaching position. Between 1900 and 1945, only three women secured tenure or held …

Picking Through The Remnants Of Brown V. Board To Realize The Ideal Of Quality Public Education For All Children In The Post Covid-19 Era, Tiffani Darden

William & Mary Law Review

Brown, above and beyond eliminating the “separate but equal” doctrine, presented many socio-legal principles that were abdicated or diluted during the government’s COVID-19 response. This Article will address several strands recognized throughout the opinion’s seventy-year history by the courts and legal commentators that were illuminated during this period. First, the pursuit of quality education remains elusive for people of color and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Second, public education continues to be an aspirational pathway to upward social mobility and building a democracy composed of educated citizens. Third, the anti-subordination construction, as opposed to the anti-classification interpretation, of the …

The Right To A Nuisance-Free Public Education, Jamel K. Donnor

William & Mary Law Review

The aim of this Article is to discuss how Florida’s Individual Freedom Act infringes upon Black students’ constitutional right to learn about non-white supremacist ideas, their freedom to think, and a public school’s ability to offer Black-centered curricula content.

[...]

This Article explains that the Individual Freedom Act’s racially encoded wording establishes an academic environment for a racial nuisance to exist because its criteria authorize public education officials to label curricula content under the auspices of indoctrination, divisiveness, or educational value. While the term “nuisance” is typically reserved for determining reasonableness of an “interference with a right common to the …

Race Without Racism: Religious School Curricula And The Race-Neutral Legacy Of Brown, Vania Blaiklock

William & Mary Law Review

Current conversations about race and equity curricula in primary and secondary education exclude examining religious curricula because of their private classification. Yet, this omission prevents us from exploring how religious curricula might mirror the legal transformation of Brown’s racial equality legacy to constitutional race neutrality. This Article brings religious curricula into these conversations by specifically linking the Court’s race-neutral transformation of Brown to the way religious curricula frame discussions about race without racism. Throughout the Article, I argue that the Court’s transformation of Brown is not just a top-down legal framework but also a bottom-up educational ideology. By making …

Why You Cannot Find A Swing Justice When You Really Need One, Neal Devins

William & Mary Law Review

From Richard Nixon’s 1972 appointment of swing Justice Lewis Powell until Donald Trump’s 2018 appointment of Brett Kavanaugh (to replace swing Justice Anthony Kennedy), the swing Justice ruled the roost. Sometimes voting with the Court’s conservatives and other times with its liberals, the swing Justice often cast the deciding vote and often embraced a sui generis middle ground. Those days now seem like a distant memory. An ideologically simpatico majority coalition drives the post-2018 Roberts Court (especially after Justice Amy Coney Barrett filled Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat in 2020). In this Article, I will use the Court’s affirmative action …

A Natural Law Approach To Parental Rights, Richard A. Epstein

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

The modern interest in the twin cases of Meyer v. Nebraska, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters has sparked a renewed curiosity in the intellectual foundations and current applicability of those two cases. In this instance, I stress less the constitutional underpinnings of the cases in order to focus more on their natural law approach to the parent-child relationship. Based on Lockean principles, I conclude that the standard rules of abuse and neglect offer the sole justification for such intervention, where the state is put to a high standard of proof for intervention. This framework has had only an …

The Supreme Court’S Mysterious 1920s Due Process Education Trilogy, David E. Bernstein

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

The Education Trilogy cases were important milestones in American constitutional history. They protected private schools, religious and otherwise, from the threat of closure in many states. This preserved educational freedom for parents who preferred private education for their children. As a constitutional matter, the Trilogy became the foundation of a due process jurisprudence that moved beyond liberty of contract, property rights, and police power considerations to a broader protection of fundamental rights.

This Article has described external forces that may have motivated this shift—revulsion at the Ku Klux Klan, backlash against Progressive statism, and the Justices’ need to cultivate allies …

Meyer, Pierce, And The Formation Of Persons, Steven D. Smith

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

This essay, written for a conference marking the centennial of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), suggests that both the ongoing importance and the frustrating elusiveness of these decisions reflect the fact that questions of the formation of persons– as contrasted with matters of the expression or manifestation of personhood– are of crucial importance in the protection of liberty and yet are difficult to grasp and address within constitutional and liberal premises. In this predicament, the decisions dealt with the problem of formation of personhood by embracing what may be …

Parental Rights, Parental Choice, And State Public Education Mandates, Nicole Stelle Garnett

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska were cases about parental rights in general, and parental choice in particular. Both centered on a challenge to a state’s legal effort to reduce or eliminate the educational choices available to parents—in the former, by requiring students to attend public schools, in the latter, by requiring instruction in all schools, public and private, be conducted in English. Pierce and Meyer also were about state efforts to forge a homogeneous American citizenry by limiting the educational choices available to parents. As Justice McReynolds observed in Meyer, “The desire of the Legislature …

The Mixed Blessing/‌Curse Of The Meyer-Pierce Legacy, Elizabeth Bartholet

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

The Supreme Court decisions in Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters left us a mixed legacy, one part blessing and one part curse. Many would agree on this but differ on which part is blessing and which part curse.

In my view the blessing is the doctrine of substantive due process protecting personal liberty. The Court did not use this language in these cases, but it did rule that the states’ attempts to interfere with parent rights in those cases violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the Court made it clear that in future …

Mired In Meyer’S Mischief A Century After Fabrication Of Constitutional Parents’ Rights, James G. Dwyer

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

The seminal Supreme Court decisions Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, now commemorated on their centenary anniversary, are odd doctrinal ducks. They are both still routinely cited as the foundation for ascribing to persons on whom the state has conferred legal parent status a right under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution. (According to Westlaw, judicial citation count for Meyer now nears 3000, and secondary-source citations have surpassed 7000.) It is a constitutional right to force states to confer on them greater legal power than the state is otherwise inclined to …

Cross-Examination And The Right To (College) Education: An Analysis Of The Substantive And Procedural Rights, Spencer Thomas

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

If the marketplace of ideas provides the basis for our growth and self-determination as a society, college campuses are the factories in which those ideas are cultivated, tested, and manufactured. Equally important, they are often the chief mechanism by which individual students are given the tools to meaningfully participate in the political process, in civic and social institutions, and the ability to chart socially mobile and economically independent lives.

Yet federal courts have never recognized a student’s liberty interest in their education. Adopting a framework initially posited by Professor Matthew Shaw, this Note advocates that students retain a substantive due …

The Future Of Higher Education: Reconciling Freedom Of Expression With Trauma-Informed Practices And Relationship-Building, Michael J. Kaufman, Jennifer R. Stukenberg

Widener Commonwealth Law Review

Our nation’s universities face significant challenges, including providing greater access and affordability, managing a business model heavily dependent on tuition revenue in an era of shifting demographics and declining enrollment, integrating technology and artificial intelligence, and mitigating serious enterprise risks.

The Arc From Non-Justiciable To Fundamental: The History Of School Funding Challenges In Pennsylvania, Claudia De Palma, Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg

Widener Commonwealth Law Review

Pennsylvania has recognized the importance of public education since the Commonwealth’s inception in 1776. Although early versions of the Pennsylvania Constitution only contemplated a discretionary system of schools for poor children, in 1834 the state’s public education system was expanded through statute to provide schooling to all children. Thaddeus Stevens, one of the founding fathers of this expansion, explained that the purpose of a universal public education system was to ensure that “the blessing of education shall be conferred on every son of Pennsylvania—shall be carried home to the poorest child of the poorest inhabitant of the meanest hut of …

Mahanoy And Its Progeny: What Do They Mean For The Future Regulation Of Student Speech Off-Campus And In Extracurricular Activities, Kathleen Conn

Widener Commonwealth Law Review

The almost universal availability and pervasive presence of the internet, and its rapidly proliferating different forms of social media, have presented challenges to defining the First Amendment rights of K-12 students when they are physically or virtually present in public schools versus in non-school settings.1 K-12 public schools publish school handbooks containing rules of conduct for students in the school context, and students are required to sign that they have read and understand the conduct rules and the consequences for violations. Schools may also require parents to attest to their knowledge of the school rules and consequences for violations.

Taking Education "Out Of Politics": The Rise Of Nonpartisan State Education Governance, Quinn Yeargain

Widener Commonwealth Law Review

Education is likely the most democratized area of policymaking in the United States. Of the approximately 13,500 public school districts in the United States, the vast majority are elected—and “school board member” is one of the most common elected offices in the country. At the state level, twenty-two states, two territories, and the District of Columbia have elected education officials. The exposure of public-school governance to direct democratic input has, in recent years, created an opening for outside forces to spend money and support candidates—which has included charter-school advocates and those opposed to “Critical Race Theory.”

Season 2 Episode 1: The New Normal, Sara Gras

Season 02

The first episode of this new season serves as an introduction to the current online sports betting landscape and the debate around legalization, responsible gaming initiatives, funding for addiction treatment, and criticisms of the industry by public health advocates. The season will delve into the history of sports betting, integrity, and the future of this increasingly normalized activity, focusing on its impact on the culture of sports and those at risk of addiction.

Features excerpts of interviews with:

Bill Pascrell, III, Lobbyist
Princeton Public Affairs Group

Jeff Wasserman, Judicial Outreach and Development Director
Delaware Council on Gambling Problems …

Leveling The Playing Field: Aligning Title Ix And Title Vii Sexual Harassment Standards To Ensure Equity For Female Hazing Victims, Cammie Swain

Cardozo Law Review

As hazing has become more common among student-athletes at colleges and universities throughout the country, litigants have used Title IX as a legal remedy to hold these educational institutions accountable for hazing practices on their campuses. However, while various male plaintiffs have brought successful Title IX cases alleging that their hazing experiences constitute actionable discrimination under Title IX, fewer women have had success in bringing such cases. This disparity looms especially large as the number of hazing incidents among women has grown and as intercollegiate athletics has transformed into a massive, lucrative industry. Since 2021, student-athletes have been able to …

Retrenchment By Diversion: The New Politics Of Parental Rights, Mary Ziegler, Maxine Eichner, Naomi Cahn

Michigan Law Review

For the past century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the importance of parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing and education. Yet suddenly the rhetoric of parental rights is being used to ground a broad range of claims on issues such as what can be taught in public schools, when minors can access gender-affirming care, or who will be punished for helping minors travel for abortion care. Why have parental-rights claims surged so visibly in contemporary law and politics? And are all the new arguments made under the banner of parental rights equally rooted in constitutional precedent?

This Article …

Radical Restorative Justice: Reflections On Conflict, Trauma, And Hope In Chicagoland Schools, Amy J. Cohen, Uma Blanchard

Cardozo Law Review

This Article tracks how abolitionist and reformist debates are unfolding within urban schools’ attempts to smash the school-to-prison pipeline. We document how Chicago-area public school teachers are grappling with new restorative justice programs and their complex and divergent sociopolitical and institutional meanings. Drawing on over forty qualitative interviews with teachers, we illustrate how difficult widespread implementation of new conflict resolution mechanisms, in the name of restorative justice, are turning out to be. We analyze how teachers are interpreting restorative justice practices and the challenges they involve for students, educators, and school administrators who learn and teach and work in hierarchical …

Public Baths & Gender Reconstruction In The Mangkunegaran Region Of Solo, Fiera Saffana, Irmawati Marwoto

International Review of Humanities Studies

The division of gender roles in space is already evident from the layout of traditional Javanese buildings, which reflects a patriarchal culture where men are at a higher level than women. These gender boundaries and norms are also reflected in the spatial form of public bath in Solo. This research uses the archaeological method by Deetz which consists of data collection, data processing, and data interpretation. Explaining by presenting facts based on data obtained in the field, then data processing is carried out by involving analysis of the field data that has been collected. The last stage is the interpretation …

Cultural Discount: Breakthrough Point Of China's Tv Drama Exports To Southeast Asia, Lingxing Li

International Review of Humanities Studies

Driven by China's "Going Global" strategy, the international influence of Chinese TV series continues to grow. As a key vehicle of China's cultural soft power, these TV series have significantly bolstered China's global cultural presence, particularly in Southeast Asia, by showcasing China's rich history and contemporary societal changes. Despite certain geographical and cultural similarities between China and Southeast Asia, cultural differences still present challenges to the dissemination of Chinese TV dramas, particularly in areas such as language, values, and religious beliefs. This paper not only analyzes effective strategies for mitigating "cultural discounts" but also challenges the traditional one-dimensional view of …

Understanding The Transmission Of Deepavali Culture In Malaysia From The Perspective Of The "Circuit Of Culture ", Su Zihua, Mochamad Aviandy

International Review of Humanities Studies

As an important traditional festival in India, Deepavali carries profound cultural and religious connotations and has spread widely across Southeast Asia. Malaysia has become a typical example for articleing the transmisi of Deepavali due to its large Indian population and diverse cultural circulation. This article adopts a qualitative research method, gathering data and literature from various platforms and deeply analyzing three aspects of Deepavali in Malaysia: representation and identity, production and consumption, and regulation.The article finds that its cultural symbols construct Indian identity, and the multicultural integration of elements promotes the identification of shared values. Various activities and advertisements during …

Towards Resolution: Comparative Lessons For Advancing Peace And Justice In Papua, Tagor Hutapea, Alexander Evan

International Review of Humanities Studies

The conflict in Papua represents a complex interplay of identity, sovereignty, and historical grievances, shaped by structural violence and socio-political exclusion. This study explores strategies for advancing peace-building and justice in Papua, drawing on Johan Galtung’s theory of peace and conflict and comparative lessons from the Aceh conflict in Indonesia and the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) struggle in South Ireland. The findings emphasize the importance of addressing root causes such as historical injustices, economic inequality, and cultural exclusion. Inclusive governance and dialogues that respect ethnic diversity and local identities are critical to creating sustainable solutions. Case studies reveal that effective …