A Guide to Public Engagement And School Finance Litigation - 2008

Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of public education funding systems are currently underway in 21 states.1 Litigation represents an opportunity to restructure the ways in which public education is financed, expanded, and delivered to children across the country. Public engagement plays a uniquely important role to ensure real improvement in our schools. Public Education Network ("PEN") has developed this Guide to encourage community-based organizations to employ public engagement strategies while school finance litigation takes place in their states. While litigation may at times seem daunting and complex to non-lawyers, community-based organizations can do much to become involved in the process. Organizations can utilize public engagement strategies to ensure that the outcome of the litigation reflects the interests of constituent groups and the public.This Guide is organized to make the process of school finance litigation meaningful and accessible to a large audience. What does school finance litigation mean? How does it come about? Whom does it affect? What options and outcomes does it make available to communities? These are among the many questions and practical considerations addressed in this Guide.The Guide is divided into three sections:An introductory section explains why public engagement and community involvement are critical in the fight for public school resources, and how community-based organizations can play active and direct roles in helping to secure resources for public schools.The second section explains how education finance policy is made in theory and practice. Historically, what has been the role of the legislature, the court, and the school district in the policymaking process?The third section explores where local education funds ("LEF") and other communitybased organizations fit into this process. We articulate a four-phase approach for community-based organizations to impact school finance litigation. Each phase is illustrated by an example of a support role played by an LEF or other community-based organization.Litigation is usually subject to lengthy delays, often lasting years, even after a court finds an existing education system unconstitutional. The reasons are often political. Elected officials feel little urgency to reach a solution that may be unpopular with the public. In the delay we lose sight of the real issues -- children, teachers, and classrooms. And children continue to go to school under a system that has been found to be unconstitutional. Our hope and belief is that, with a sharpened focus on children, teachers, and classrooms, brought to bear by public engagement efforts, public pressure will move lawsuits along expeditiously to ensure that all children receive a quality public education

Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Jails: Recommendations for Local Practice

People of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system. One in three African American men born today will be incarcerated in his lifetime. In some cities, African Americans are ten times more likely to be arrested when stopped by police. With the national debate national focused on race, crime, and punishment, criminal justice experts are examining how to reduce racial disparities in our prisons and jails, which often serve as initial entry points for those who become entangled in the criminal justice system.This report, which relies on input from 25 criminal justice leaders, pinpoints the drivers of racial disparities in our jails, lays out common sense reforms to reduce this disparity, including increasing public defense representation for misdemeanor offenses, encouraging prosecutors to prioritize serious and violent offenses, limiting the use of pretrial detention, and requiring training to reduce racial bias for all those involved in running our justice system

A Guide to Public Engagement and School Finance Litigation - 2005

Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of public school funding systems are currently in progress in 23 states,i representing a unique opportunity to restructure the ways in which public education is financed and expand the opportunities and resources available to children across the country.PEN has developed this guide to encourage community organizations to employ public engagement strategies in the context of school finance litigation taking place in their states

Practical nous as the aim of legal education?

There has been an implicit assumption that legal education should be about exposition and evaluation, and should reward facility in exposition and theoretical awareness. This theoretically based assumption generates a theory-induced blindness. Specifically, it obscures the dynamic relationship between law and legal practice, despite it being a familiar aspect of the world. The lawyer as rule entrepreneur is lost sight of. One alternative assumption about legal education would be that law is a game like activity; and legal education should be directed towards promoting those qualities that would enhance performance in this game. In this approach to legal education it would be practical nous that would be sought and rewarded, and such qualities as facility in exposition and theoretical awareness would receive recognition merely as qualities that can be ancillary to and elements of practical nous. Doctrinal legal education naturally pulls towards the first theory, and clinical legal education naturally pulls towards the second. We argue for a clearer awareness of the role of rule entrepreneurship in clinical programmes and in legal education generally

Ford Foundation Grantees and the Pursuit of Justice

Provides a summary of Ford's early work with public interest law strategies. Looks at policy research, grassroots activism and advocacy, and law-related strategies that have been employed by foundation partners to pursue equity and social justice

The Teaching of Procedure Across Common Law Systems

What difference does the teaching of procedure make to legal education, legal scholarship, the legal profession, and civil justice reform? This first of four articles on the teaching of procedure canvasses the landscape of current approaches to the teaching of procedure in four legal systems—the United States, Canada, Australia, and England and Wales—surveying the place of procedure in the law school curriculum and in professional training, the kinds of subjects that “procedure” encompasses, and the various ways in which procedure is learned. Little sustained reflection has been carried out as to the import and impact of this longstanding law school subject. Through a comparative approach, this series of articles explores what difference the approach a particular jurisdiction has chosen to adopt makes for legal education, legal scholarship, the practice of law and the profession, and to civil justice reform in our legal system. En quoi l’enseignement de la procédure civile modifi e-t-il les études juridiques, la recherche juridique, la profession d’avocat et la réforme de la justice civile? Ce premier de quatre articles sur l’enseignement de la procédure dresse le tableau de l’approche actuellement utilisée dans quatre systèmes juridiques – aux États-Unis, au Canada, en Australie, en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles – et se penche sur la place qu’occupe la procédure dans le programme des facultés de droit et dans la formation professionnelle, les matières qui constituent la « procédure » et les diverses façons d’apprendre la procédure. L’importance et l’incidence de cette matière traditionnelle des facultés de droit ont fait jusqu’ici l’objet de fort peu de réfl exion en profondeur. Par le biais d’une approche comparative, cette série d’articles examine en quoi l’approche adoptée dans ces pays modifi e chez nous les études et la recherche juridiques, la pratique du droit, la profession d’avocat et la réforme du système de justice civile

The Empirical Turn In Family Law

Historically, the legal system justified family law’s rules and policies through morality, common sense, and prevailing cultural norms. In a sharp departure, and consistent with a broader trend across the legal system, empirical evidence increasingly dominates the regulation of families. There is much to celebrate in this empirical turn. Properly used, empirical evidence in family law can help the state act more effectively and efficiently, unmask prejudice, and depoliticize contentious battles. But the empirical turn also presents substantial concerns. Beyond perennial issues of the quality of empirical evidence and the ability of legal actors to use it, there are more fundamental problems: Using empirical evidence focuses attention on the outcomes of legal rules, discouraging a debate about contested and competing values. Reliance on empirical evidence overlays a veneer of neutrality on normative judgments. And uncritically adopting evidence about present conditions without interrogating the role of historical discrimination that continues to disadvantage some families can replicate that discrimination. Given the promise and peril of the empirical turn in family law, this Essay proposes a framework to guide the use of this evidence. The framework preserves space for debating multiple values and advises decisionmakers when to use empirical evidence, with particular attention to the dangers for nondominant families. The framework also recommends strengthening evidentiary gatekeeping and elevating the potential for legal scholarship to serve as a bridge from the broader research base to the courts. With this guidance in place, empirical evidence can take its rightful place as a useful but cabined tool in the legal regulation of families