Education Law Center

ABSTRACT The law often asks judges to determine whether a violation is clearly established or whether legal language clearly or unambiguously supports a position. It demands that litigants not raise arguments or claims that would be easily dismissed. And for their part legal scholars have relied on the distinction between easy and hard cases as they delineate the concept of law itself. Yet, few have empirically studied assessments of legal difficulty. Here, we present the results of two studies that provide insight into the reliability of such assessments from laypeople and actual judges. For both populations, our key finding was this: assessments of case difficulty are highly predictive of the vote breakdown in a case; that is, the larger the size of a majority coalition, the lower the average difficulty rating registered by the members of that coalition (and, conversely, the smaller the size of a minority coalition, the higher the rating registered by its members). These results suggest that, while assessments of case difficulty are tied to case outcomes, they are a complex signal. Experiencing the feeling that a case is unusually difficult is not necessarily an indication that you are dealing with a 50/50 case, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it may be an indication that your position on the merits would be decisively rejected by the vast majority of others confronting the same question.

This brief describes how several commonly used per-pupil funding measures derived from federal data include passthrough funding in the numerator but exclude students attached to this funding from the denominator, artificially inflating per-pupil ratios. Three forms of passthrough funding for students not educated by the school district where they reside are included in district-level funding totals: payments to private schools (V91), payments to charter schools (V92), and payments to other school systems (Q11). We illustrate this error in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and use data from all 46 impacted states to show how racial and economic funding gaps are understated as a result.