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Parent Self-Help after Carter and the 1977 Amendments JOHN M. FARAGO Associate Professor of Law, CUNY Law School |
This is an outline of material presented at the Education Law Institute at Franklin Pierce L:aw Center on August 5, 1999. Origins of Special Ed Law. Links are to PDF files or Word 97/98 documents. Some are quite long (in particular, the Code of Federal Regulations material and the IDEA text) and may take considerable time to download. Both the regs and the law were downloaded from a valuable site, the Office of Special Education Programs site at the Department of Education. The text of IDEA is from the House bill, and is identical to the adopted text except for the numbering scheme. The House numbering follows a pattern beginning with '601(a)' while the codified version begins with '1401(a)'. To translate to the codified cite, you need merely switch the '6' to a '14' consistently throughout.
Although it involves specialized bibliographic tools and can seem daunting to those not familiar with it, there is nothing mysterious or difficult about legal citation and legal research. Franklin Pierce offers a course on legal research techniques for non-lawyer educators. Moreover, anyone with access to a law library can teach themselves (that's what I more or less did when I was in 10th grade researching a debate topic). An excellent resource both as a self-teaching tool and as a reference is the book Legal Research Illustrated, by Jacobstein, et al, published by Foundation Press.
Access to legal materials online is available in extremely detailed and richly searchable contexts via Westlaw (which includes access to the IDELR) and LEXIS, both of which are quite costly for a casual user (and require a good deal of practice to use efficiently). A more basic source of caselaw, and far less expensive, is VersusLaw. The IDELR and related materials are awkwardly indexed and follow a practice of not adequately providing parallel citation to official reporters (thereby unnecessarily fostering dependence on the publisher's proprietary databases and limiting access). Wherever possible, I encourage users to rely on the official versions, rather than on the IDELR (which, despite this caution, provides excellent synopses and updates of changes in the law of special education).
The cited material is not meant to be comprehensive but rather serves to provide a context within which to explore current issues arising out of parent self-help placements undertaken pursuant to the decisions in Burlington v. Massachusetts and Carter v. Florence County.
Professor Farago may be contacted at: