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This book brings together an array of leading scholars to engage three critical questions surrounding the current debate over a federal right to education. First, should the United States recognize such a right? The authors of part 1 collectively answer this question as they weigh the arguments for and against. They paint a picture of crippling inequality within our schools—sharing accounts of massive racial and socioeconomic disparities along the way—which compels them to form a nearly unanimous consensus that a federal right to education would reap important benefits for all students. But even assuming this is true, a second question remains as to how the United States could establish such a right. Accordingly, the authors of part 2 explore three different mechanisms for establishing a federal right: implying the right through the Constitution, enacting the right in federal law, or adopting it through a constitutional amendment. Finally, if a federal right to education is recognized, what should it guarantee? The authors of part 3 confront this critical substantive question by weaving novel policy solutions together with evidence-based reforms to present options for ensuring that a federal right to education encompasses the tools and policy levers that are necessary to accomplish the goals that reformers espouse. Their proposals also provide key insights for impactful reforms for state courts interpreting education rights as well state lawmakers seeking to improve educational opportunities and outcomes. In response to these and other fundamental questions about the vast opportunity and achievement gaps of American schoolchildren, this volume builds on the current dialogue—both political and scholarly—that contends that education is the critical civil rights issue of our time.

The wide-ranging chapters of this ambitious volume advance our understanding of how Natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires strained to use the other’s law as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  Europeans and Natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their resort to each other’s law. Each misconstrued the other’s legal commitments while learning about them. The contributors explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: how and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically, and morally—to Natives, and vice versa? To address this question, the volume goes beyond existing scholarship, which juxtaposes settlers’ and Natives’ understanding in empire-specific circumstances, by adding another axis of comparison, that between English and Iberian New World empires. Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples. Understanding the conflict and transformation of notions of justice and law through a dual comparative study of legal intelligibility is the objective of this volume.

Visual and multimedia digital technologies are transforming the practice of law: how lawyers construct and argue their cases, present evidence to juries, and communicate with each other. They are also changing how law is disseminated throughout and used by the general public. What are these technologies, how are they used and perceived in the courtroom and in wider culture, and how do they affect legal decision making? This book explains how, when, and why legal practice moved from a largely words-only environment to one more dependent on and driven by images, and how rapidly developing technologies have further accelerated this change. It discusses older visual technologies, such as videotape evidence, and then current and future uses of visual displays and digital multimedia technologies, including trial presentation software and interactive multimedia. It also describes how law itself is going online, in the form of virtual courts, cyberjuries, and more, and explores the implications of law's movement to computer screens.