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general trends in cases involving school discipline. For example, the September, 1998 issue of
the National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin included articles with titles
such as: “The Principal and Student Expression: From Armbands to Tattoos”; “Search and
Seizure in the Schools”; and “The Principal and Discipline with Special Education Students”
(National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin 1998).
Further, many school districts employ legal counsel on an ongoing or temporary basis to
notify administrators about the generalities of relevant case decisions, as well as to represent the
district in legal disputes. School personnel often consult legal counsel when drawing up school
discipline codes—especially zero tolerance policies—in order to ensure the legality of school
rules. In 2000, the there were over 3,000 members in Council of School Attorneys, a national
organization of lawyers who practice school law.
2
Clearly, there were many opportunities and
organizational structures available to help school personnel remain informed about changes in
local court climates related to school discipline. However, given the complexity and ambiguity
inherent to law in this area, these avenues of legal information were useful in attuning school
personnel to general court climates, but were likely imperfect mechanisms to communicate
definitive identification of judicially acceptable school disciplinary practices in all areas.
DATA AND METHODS: MEASURING COURT CLIMATES
Until recently, satisfactorily measuring court case outcomes in a specific area of law
across jurisdictions and over time has not been feasible. Current availability of large
computerized data sets containing appellate court case decisions at both state and federal levels,
such as the Lexis-Nexis database, has expanded opportunities for data mining to quantitatively
2
Council of School Attorneys web site: www.nsba.org/cosa/About/ (5/30/2000).
Convention