Would Teachers Read the Law If It Was Available?
Justin Bathon on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 7:04PM Listened to a great podcast from the Berkman Center on open access law. Specifically, it was an interview with Carl Malamud, of public.resource.org fame, on his and other efforts to open up the law. They have a series of upcoming discussions at the nation's top law schools to work on this issue and he will be addressing Congress on the issue in the near future.
Anyway, one of the main points Carl gave for people opposing open access efforts on the part of the government is that the public won't read the law anyway, and so it is not worth the cost to the government to put it out there. Better to let private companies (West, Lexis) pick up that cost and then charge a fee only to those people that really need access and thus are willing to pay (collectively over 10 billion dollars annually). Now, technologists like me usually scoff at such suggestions, but in this case I want to pause to give it a bit more thought, and specifically, to see whether you think teachers would use the law (statutes, cases, regulations, board policies, handbooks, 100% of everything) if it were available? And, if they were to read it, how would they use it?
I personally have very mixed feelings on this having taught teachers and principals how to use the law for the past few years, but I am much more interested in your thoughts.
Reader Comments (4)
It seems to me that some teachers would read such materials frequently (think your local union rep), but the question is whether they would understand what they read wihtout more undergraduate exposure to school law than is currently provided through our teacher training schools.
I see the open access idea as a good one, though. From a "law and economics" perspective, the idea that one must fork over thousands of dollars per year (or potentially hundreds per session, if that is your payment plan) to read cases and statutes that are available in less accessible formats in law libraries GREATLY increases transaction costs in nearly all law-related endeavors. Making that stuff available online for free (perhaps with Google-type search technology embedded) would obviously reduce those costs.
It might not change the character of high-level business practices, but it would certainly help solos and small firms, as well as public-interest lawyers (who represent lots of school kids), not to mention the average citizen with a problem neighbor who wants to look up the noise statutes, or the average teacher who would like to read the state's tenure statute or the local board policy.
Although a few teachers/principals would "read the law" if available, I doubt many would. Here in Maine, most "law" is available online and very few teachers who I know ever go there even when I send them a link (as the union rep spoken of above). The problem is that "the law" is not a monolithic entity. One can't go read a statute and know everything there is to know about what it means, why it was written the way it was, what cases (both judicial and agency) have interpreted it, what regulations/policies have been promulgated because of it, etc., etc. So, with everything else teachers have to do, researching a legal matter is not a high priority. Even if they were to do it, could they be sure they had the right answer? Of course not, because there's always someone with another perspective (usually the superintendent who regular access to lawyers and the time to consult them).
Thanks for the comments. I think both of you hit on my thoughts.
I am definitely on board with reducing the cost in the legal world associated with West and Lexis. I still think they would have a place, as their initial summaries and headnotes are worth paying for if you are a serious law firm. Plus, their internal hyperlinking might be hard to replicate.
On the other hand, I am with you Nancy in thinking that it would only be a few that actually bother to read it. But, perhaps a few from each district might read it per year, and if you consider all the districts in the U.S. - that would actually be a pretty large number of people.
Nancy, your point about the law not being a monolithic entity I think is a great one. We certainly have not built the law to be accessed via google or wikipedia. We have a federal statute, several implementing regulations (not to mention legislative history), perhaps some administrative guidance, a state replication of that statute, state implementing regulations, district policy, and potentially hundreds of cases of precedence in interpreting that language ... and even then, like you said, there is usually not one "right" interpretation. -- This strikes me as a pretty big problem.
But, here's what I think could be amazingly useful. What if a union, say the Maine Education Association or something to just pick one out of the air (wink), started a collaborative question and answer online wiki about teacher legal rights? If you got 25 or so teachers to regularly put effort into it, it could easily develop into a heck of a great resource for teachers and parents around the state. So, I really think it is not so much the initial legal dumps that might be useful, but the remixing of those dumps into more user friendly and knowledge enriched formats.
I don't know. Still trying to get my head around this issue.
If "the law" was openly accessible, I guarantee that new entities would arise that translated, repackaged, data-mined, and otherwise added value to the public work. I can't see how this would be anything but good for all of us.