Scholars Weigh Court Influence Over School Practices, Climate

Judicial decisions on schools are subject of critical analyses at conference.

Washington

The courts play a big part in many aspects of public education in the United States, but it wasn’t always that way. And was the situation inevitable?

That was one question that a group of legal scholars, education policy experts, and a few practitioners sought to answer last week at a conference here about the role of the legal system in education.

“The judiciary is amazingly understudied, even though it is ubiquitous in the regulation of public education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsored the Oct. 15 conference along with the American Enterprise...