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In this portion of the chapter, we address these questions: What makes a situation ethically challenging? What if ethical obligations conflict with law? When the needs and rights of multiple parties conflict, is our primary responsibility to the student, parent, teacher, or school system? How do we evaluate whether a course of action is ethical? And how can we make good choices when ethical-legal dilemmas arise?

Jacob-Timm (1999) surveyed school psychology practitioners and asked them to describe ethically challenging situations that they had encountered in their work. She found that ethical-legal dilemmas can be created by situations involving competing ethical principles, conflicts between ethics and law, the conflicting interests of multiple parties, dilemmas inherent in the dual roles of employee and student advocate, poor educational practices resulting in potential harm to students, and because it is difficult to decide how broad ethics code statements apply to a particular situation. In a structured survey of school psychology practitioners, Dailor and Jacob (2011) found that almost three-fourths of the 208 respondents indicated they had encountered at least one of eight types of ethical dilemmas during the previous year. Whereas some ethical dilemmas are quickly and easily resolved, others are troubling and time-consuming (Sinclair, 1998). These findings support the view that, in addition to knowledge of the content of ethical codes, skill in using a systematic decision-making procedure is needed.