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Courts and Public Schools: Educational Litigation in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

David Tyack  and
Aaron Benavot
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Abstract

This study is an exploratory social history of litigation about public education. Using West digests as an index of appellate cases, it first examines the changing volume and character of litigation from the earliest recorded cases until 1981. It then relates trends in litigation to two broad phases of educational history: the system-building era, when courts helped to clarify the lines of authority in an ambiguously decentralized system; and the new functions of litigation in the twentieth century, when administrative progressives sought to use legislation to reshape schooling. It turns then to the relation between school law and social conflict over basic dividing lines of religion, race, and ethnicity and suggests that courts played a relatively small role in adjudicating such issues until recent times. Finally, it contrasts the recent history of litigation—by some called a “legal revolution”—when excluded groups sought to reshape schooling.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , 1985 , pp. 339 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

The authors wish to thank Lawrence Friedman, Robert Gordon, Thomas James, Carl Kaestle, David Kirp, David Rogosa, and the reviewers and editor of the Law & Society Review for helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this study. We also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Spencer Foundation and the Stanford Center for the Study of Youth Development. This essay forms part of a larger study of law and public education to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

References

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