Previous issues of West's Education Law Reporter provided successive longitudinal analyses of the volume of litigation in the public elementary and secondary school context (hereinafter referred to as “K-12”) respectively ending in each of the prior three decades. These trend studies, like other such tabulations,2 were based on the West's Key Number System.
The predecessor analyses revealed that on an overall basis the “boom” in education litigation ended in the 1970s, with the succeeding three decades forming more of a rippled high plateau. The most recent of the earlier analyses identified differences in terms of judicial forum and case category.3 For forum, the federal courts' proportion of the overall total increased from 2% in the 1940s to 45% in the decade 2000-09.4 For category, the most pronounced change was the continued growth of the special education student category.5 The analysis also identified various limitations in tracking trends via the West Key Number system, including, for example, mitigated but not eliminated multiple counting of cases.
As a result, two related metaphors led to revision in the title of this latest analysis. First, although referring generally to “litigation,” all of these analyses are limited to the published decisions7 that form the proverbial tip of the iceberg, which has several larger levels that are submerged from visibility.8 As a result, the title of this article uses “judicial rulings” for improved approximation.9 Second, the “explosion” metaphor in the titles of earlier analyses is attributable to the dramatic increase in the numbers found in the initial decades culminating immediately before and after the turbulent 1970s.10 Instead, the title of this article uses the more accurate and neutral term of “longitudinal trends.” During the intervening period since the 2011 update, other longitudinal tabulations of the volume of K-12 education litigation have been scant, such as one limited to published judicial rulings in special education within a fifteen-year period.11 Such narrow studies employ search strategies that do not rely on the Westlaw Key Number categories because their much smaller scope allow for more time-consuming collection and selection.
Thus, an updated extension of the previous line of broad-based longitudinal analyses is warranted. Due to its feasibility for this purpose, the procedure relies on the Westlaw system.