Epilogue

It is a pleasure to write the epilogue to this amazing book. Normore, Ehrensal, First, and Torres have assembled some of the very best minds in our field in this compendium which explores the boundaries of complex legal thinking and policymaking as they relate to schools. In the past 25 years that I have been active in the field of education law, I have had the pleasure of working collaboratively with this publication’s editors and meeting many of the chapter contributors. I have seen careers grow, new ideas formulate, and scholarship ripen, mature, and sometimes change direction.

Similarly, I have witnessed legal issues emerge, shift focus, take a hiatus, and often remerge in a different form years later. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s and well into the 1990s (when I started my career in academia), courts often addressed what I would characterize as “big picture” issues. Indeed, during this period the United States Supreme Court rendered a dozen decisions on school desegregation followed quickly by Brown v. Board of Education’s (1954) progeny, that is, a second tier of decisions based on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and applied to discrimination against groups such as such as women, linguistic minorities, and persons with disabilities.