Finding Free Legal Information

A short article Kevin Brady and I did for NSBA Leadership Insider is published and making the rounds now. We did a survey of ed. law interested folks regarding how they get their legal information related to education and articulate some of the results, although more results will be published in a later article. Anyway, we also include in the piece some great resources for finding free education law information online. Those resources are also available here (scroll down).

Despite the impact of the Internet, however, the majority of court cases, statutes, regulations, and other legal information is still published, either in hard copy or online, for a relatively high cost for educational practitioners. Compared to other legal specializations, moreover, the field of education law has been noticeably slow in its integration of electronic media technologies, such as specialized websites or blogs focusing on education law.

I encourage you to read the whole Leadership Insider issue, however, because Dave Schimmel and Matt Militello articulate some of their work on teacher legal literacy (which was earlier published in the Harvard Education Review) and Sarah Redfield, long a visionary on educational law issues, writes on breaking down the silos between the legal and educational worlds.

NSBA, without a doubt, is doing the best job in the country at getting legal resources online and into the hands of educators. Their school law pages are an invaluable resource for anyone doing any work related to education law.