Since 1973, fights over how public schools are funded have belonged to the state courts — and the state courts do not agree on whether they can hear them. Corinne Milnamow’s law review Comment takes on the question.
In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court held that education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution. School-finance litigation moved to the states, where nearly every constitution contains some form of education clause. The result, as Corinne Milnamow documents in a Comment published in Volume 78 of the University of Miami Law Review, is a three-way split: some state high courts have struck down funding schemes, some have upheld them, and some have declared the question a nonjusticiable political question and declined to decide it at all.
The Comment focuses on the third path and on the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision in Shea v. State, which treated school funding as a matter for the legislature alone. Corinne argues the court got it wrong. The Nevada Constitution, she contends, supplies an enforceable education guarantee; deciding whether the legislature has honored it is an ordinary exercise of judicial review, not an intrusion into politics; and property-tax-based funding produces disparities that track district wealth in ways that are hard to square with the promise of Brown. She closes by arguing for recognition of a fundamental right to a basic education, so that a student’s constitutional protection does not depend on which state, and which line of precedent, she happens to live under.
Corinne wrote the Comment while serving as a Senior Writing Editor of the Law Review and as a fellow in the school’s Children & Youth Law Clinic. She also contributed to the Law Review’s online Insights series in December 2022, with a piece urging federal oversight of the “troubled teen industry” — residential programs marketed to parents as therapeutic — through the proposed Accountability for Congregate Care Act. Both pieces are freely available.
Read the Comment: Inconsistencies in State Court Decisions Regarding Public School Financing Are Violating the Constitutional Rights of Citizens: Why the Nevada Court in Shea v. State Should Have Intervened — 78 U. Miami L. Rev. 227 (2023)
Online piece: Her Insights piece on federal oversight of the troubled teen industry — University of Miami Law Review, December 4, 2022
About Corinne Milnamow
Corinne Milnamow is an associate in the firm’s Miami office, where she represents corporate and individual clients in complex commercial litigation, including business and shareholder disputes, aviation matters, contract litigation, and condominium-related disputes. She earned her J.D. from the University of Miami School of Law, where she served as a Senior Writing Editor of the University of Miami Law Review.
Publication spotlights summarize work our attorneys have published elsewhere; the views expressed in the original pieces are the authors’ own. Insights posts are offered for general information and are not legal advice.
