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As Hubsch (1989) noted, the majority of public school statutory law is enacted at the state level. School psychologists must become familiar with the laws pertinent to the delivery of school psychological services in the state where they are employed, in addition to federal statutes and regulations. State laws affecting education typically can be found at a state’s department of education website.

A third source of law is case law. Case law, or common law, is law that emerges from court decisions (Russo, 2018). The common law system can be traced back to medieval England. At that time, it was widely accepted that there were “laws of nature” to guide solutions to problems if those laws could be discovered. Legal scholars studied past court decisions for the purpose of discovering those “natural laws.” The rules and principles that judges customarily followed in making decisions were identified and, at times, articulated in case decisions, and judges tended to base new decisions on those earlier legal precedents. Common law is thus discovered law rather than enacted law (Russo, 2018, p. 1). Many aspects of public school law today are based on common law rather than enacted law, as Russo pointed out. For example, the courts generally have upheld a teacher’s right to use corporal punishment to discipline students where no state laws or school board policies prohibit its use. Acceptance of the use of corporal punishment in the schools by courts has a long history in case law (see ssss1).