The Edjurist - Information on School and Educational Law

Lots of current events have caused me to consider what the future of education law information will look like. I'm the new technology chair for ELA, Scott B. has been appointed to West's Education Law Reporter Board, Mark Walsh (who has a redesigned site) and I have been talking lately, and lots of other thought provokers. Collectively, it has caused me to think about what education law information will look like in the future and the following are some of my thoughts:

Westlaw & Lexis. I have now lived a over a year without them and I can confidently say there is simply no replacement. They are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. I've posted on free alternatives, and while those are developing rapidly, West and Lexis are doing more, more quickly, and with more detail because of their enormous capitalization and human resources. The free resources can't match that development process. At least not yet because there has been no organization toward shared goals.
Just a few blogs. This blogging thing has been around quite a while, and while there is a substantial stable of education law blogs, it is by no means the plethora that I thought might develop. Instead, what I think we have seen are a few bloggers really develop substantial followings. Jim Gerl, for instance, at the Special Education Law Blog, has leveraged his blog into a 600 member facebook group, among other things. These blogs are filling the space that other potential blogs might develop into. Thus, I think we have moved past everyone coming to the table, to everyone sorting out to the few existing tables.
Lots of Linking. While I think there will be few bloggers serving as permanent resources, I think there will lots more linking between independently produced news. Links to MSNBC articles, ACLU postings, cases, new videos, etc. will be shared mostly between randomly existing groups, with some coordination at professional association levels (see @ELAOffice and @legalclips). Again, professional associations provide some structural support, but most of this type of information sharing I see as being random and independent. The sources for this type of linking will be e-mails, twitter, facebook, maybe Ning's, etc.
The Relegation of (Paper) Books. I don't see education law books, including texts, as surviving forever. I see them surviving, especially the texts, as long as there continues to be an overload of ed. leadership preparation entities without law specialists (i.e. the Alexanders are the law specialists and the teacher is just a facilitator). But, I don't see that educational regime as holding on forever. States are decertifying programs, forcing redesign, permitting district alternatives, allowing online courses, etc. At the same time, the Internet permits the existing specialists to have a further reach. Thus, the forces are working against the traditional textbook model everyday, and everyday textbooks in education law lose a little ground. They have already lost ground to me. I don't require a textbook in most of my education law courses at the moment, and in a couple years I will probably do away with the textbook altogether. There may still be a place for online texts (think Rapp's Education Law currently on Lexis going public) and I think paper resources will never totally disappear, but the profit margins for paper education law books is shrinking and at some point most of them just won't be financially feasible.
The Proliferation of Journals. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I see journals as expanding in their role. But, that probably doesn't apply to the existing journals, unless they engage in some radical changes. In some ways, there will likely be a merger between blogging and journals. This may seem an unsubstantiated statement, and that's because it is at the moment. As of now, we have not seen any new online journals in education law survive. But, just because the surface is calm, doesn't mean there is not vast movement below the surface. It is just far too easy for a group of ed. law interested folks to start a journal to think that it won't happen. Not only will it probably happen, but I imagine it will happen in a big way. Law schools will support some of these outlets, but most will probably exist independently geared more for the educational audience. Not all will be indexed by West, but all will be indexed by Google - which is just as useful, if not more so. This really could happen immediately, the start-up costs are that low, and I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about a new journal starting tomorrow. This is just waiting on organization of like-minded individuals.
Governmental Contributors. I think you are going to start seeing a whole lot more sites like this one in Missouri. There is simply too much educational law and too few educational law professors and practitioners to disseminate it. So, the producers of the educational law themselves will probably start doing a better job of disseminating their own information. Not only have judicial circuits started putting out their own cases and state legislatures started putting out their own statutes, but increasingly they are also offering summaries, better searching, indexing, linking, and lots of other features that makes the information dump actually useful. I would also expect movement from the federal department of education in this direction soon.
Professional Associations and Other Entities. Filling in the governmental gaps will be professional associations. NSBA already does an outstanding job (actually, I have learned that Tom Burns is really doing most of the exceptional work) and ELA is beginning to wake up to this online world (interested to see just how much they want to play). But, that won't be the end of it. Already NASSP has shown it wants to play (and I helped). And I expect lots more involvement from bar associations, advocacy groups, policy centers, and more. To stay relevant in the information economy, you need to be putting out information. So, more and more entities are likely to jump into the fray, with varying levels of quality and substance.

And, so in sum I see more information distributed more widely. Instead of compiling all of educational law into a single 600 page textbook, the independent and distributed educational law information sources will slowly take their place - which offer much richer information on any given topic. Already if you search Google for "student expression rights" you get a whole page of useful links each of which has slightly different takes from slightly different sources - and, heck, my paper on student expression comes up on the second page and full text is available.

But, my article coming up on the second page or my involvement with NASSP is an important indicator. The media of educational law information is likely to substantially change, but the sources of educational law information are likely to change much more slowly. The experts are still going to be the experts for a while. And, while new people may jump on and try to become experts, the simpler and cheaper way to generate information is still to let the existing experts write it (or record it as the case may be). Few people may read Mark Walsh's education law stories in the paper version of Ed. Week in the future, but few self-respecting legal experts miss his blog posts. Mark Walsh hasn't changed, just the medium. In the same way, professors are still going to be major content providers, although the medium in which they are publishing is likely to change. And that will be both good and bad. You might be able to talk to a professor in a different state or country on twitter, but that professor may spend more time tweeting 140 character entries instead of 30,000 word essays. Or, for instance, the online journal articles may be smaller and more to the point (if one person does a good lit. review, why not just link to it and save the trouble). So, there will definitely be some substantive changes as the medium changes, but the basic content points are unlikely to change all that much.

So, I think that's the future of educational law information that we are looking at. More choices in increasingly different media published by an increasing lot of publishers, but a whole lot of the same old players and much of the same content categories.