Spinning around the Educational Law Association e-mail listserv the past couple of days was a request by an educational professor for free resources she could use in an in-service professional development situation for teachers. She got several good responses, including this Alabama oriented educational law text, educational law blogs (thanks to Scott McLeod and CASTLE), the (members-only???) Educational Law Association Forum, links to non-educationally based legal resources, and a few other responses referring to textbooks (of the pay, non-online variety).
First, there are several helpful non-educationally oriented sites out there, such as Findlaw, the Legal Information Institute, Oyez, and on and on. And some education policy organizations have done their best, such as the Education Commission of the States Issues Database and the National School Board's Association School Law Pages. The problem is, there really are no websites dedicated solely to educational law resources. The best attempt ever made was done by Sarah Redfield, and her Edlaw Online Library. While I think it was an admirable and effective effort, it is difficult for one person to do it all. At this library, Sarah provided many educational law cases, but there really was no search option so you need to know what you are looking for before you use it and the statutes, articles, and other resources section of the page still had a lot of holes. (Please comment with links if you know of other resources).
In 2005-06, I did a quick study of educational law resource availability online and this is the report I wrote at that time.
Anyway, all of this of course begs the question ... why not? Why are there so few legal resources online related to schools and education? Given the extremely significant number of people having a relationship with education (6.2 million teachers, 76.6 million students ... on any given day over 1/4 of the U.S. population are in schools) it seems a serious omission. Sure, there are limited resources available, but there is no place that attempts to aggregate those resources. This is something we need to work on in the coming years and hopefully something that the Educational Law Association or different educational law organizations can take the lead in so that there is not just a bunch of individual, uncoordinated efforts.
The worst part is that there are resources already available and much of the hard work is already being done. The problem is that we are just not thinking about making this already-existing work available in electronic, freely accessible ways. For instance, I write for the School Law Reporter which is a monthly benefit given to all dues paying members of the Education Law Association. The writers for the School Law Reporter are all educational law scholars that brief nearly all the educational law cases that are decided each month. At the end of the year, members are given a yearly index of all the cases that were briefed. What if that was in a freely accessible database that could be searched with outside links to the full text of the cases? Over time, the number of cases would build and there would a critical mass of educational law cases to drive usership. While the resource is currently seen as a benefit to encourage membership, imagine 1000 daily hits to the ELA homepage ... seems like that would encourage membership also (see this post about how ELA does not even show up on the first Google search page). Additionally, ELA could throw up an advertisement or two that could drive additional revenue which in turn could lower the cost of dues and again increase membership.
Increasingly, these free legal resources are going to be important. A friend of mine this semester is teaching an educational law course to pre-service educational leaders entirely online. The students cannot use Lexis-Nexis Academic in this type of course structure and she too asked me where she can find educational law resources online that she can have her students use to write papers. Of course, I helped point her to the few resources that are available and she committed to using those if nothing else, but she was still undecided whether she could have students write the research paper given the lack of available legal resources. This is a common problem - as indicated above with the in-service teacher training. Even I train my students on Lexis Nexis, but I know full well that they will probably never have access to that resource in their careers and they will probably never use it again. We have to be proactive in our approach to providing educational law resources online. We need to put the important cases online and we need to keep that case database updated, either in a wiki format or through an association. We need to provide links and access to school law statutes and regulations. To legal commentary (what about an electronic, peer-reviewed journal?) and news (blogs are making progress here). All of us educational lawyers are working to improve education through our research, writing and teaching. But, if the vast, vast majority of educational practitioners and students cannot access this scholarship, just how useful is it? I am not against people making a buck and there will always be a significant role for Lexis and Westlaw and Law Journals and there is a certain audience of educational law scholars and practitioners that are always going to be willing to pay for services that the general population will not. But, we need to get some educational law information into the hands of the general public and the easiest and best way to do that is by building the educational law infrastructure online.