Special Education Law 2.0

I built Special Education Law in 2014 to make information about special education rights accessible to everyone. At the time, if you wanted to search Massachusetts special education case law, you had to read one decision at a time or pay for a service. I thought that information, and the process to search for it, should be free. So I built a WordPress site, loaded it up with decisions, and pointed a search bar at them.

That version served its purpose for a long time. But it was showing its age; candidly, I no longer enjoyed using it. The whole site was held together by rubber bands, paper clips, and chewing gum, which made it hard to improve. I remember talking to Bill Crane, a former BSEA hearing officer, when I was working at Massachusetts Advocates for Children. He had great ideas for the site that I didn't know how to implement at the time (such as Shepardizing, where you can see which hearing officers relied on the analysis of other hearing officers). I'm excited to finally add them.

What's new

Citation tracking. Decisions now link to other BSEA decisions they cite. If you're reading a ruling and it references an earlier case, you can follow the citation directly. This makes it much easier to trace how the BSEA has treated a particular issue across time. Precedent is the bedrock of legal analysis. It helps attorneys advise their clients on when to fight and when to fold. Without precedent and the ability to analyze outcomes accurately, lawyers can't do their jobs.

Smarter search. The old site had basic keyword matching. The new search engine supports phrase search with quotes, OR operators, exclusion with the minus sign, and proximity search (find two terms within a certain number of words of each other). You can also filter directly from the search bar.

Tags and filters. You can filter results by hearing officer, school district, outcome (parent win, district win, mixed), and document type (decisions vs. rulings). These work alongside keyword search, so you can do things like find all decisions by a specific hearing officer involving a particular district.

User accounts. A lot of folks requested this feature, and I'm happy to bring it to the site, but it comes with a few caveats. You can create a free account and save decisions to organized folders. If you're working on a case and compiling relevant precedent, you can create a folder for it and return to it later. However, the site does not store usernames or passwords (authentication is handled via Google), and there's no way for me to retrieve your data if you get locked out. Good news for privacy, bad news if you like to back-up your work.

Bring your own AI. AI is everywhere right now, even when we don't want it. I made the decision not to build artificial intelligence into the website itself. But AI can still be a powerful research tool if you want to use it. The site has a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, which means you can connect your own AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, or anything else that supports MCP) directly to the database. Instead of just keyword searching, you can ask natural language questions like "find cases with Newton Public Schools involving unilateral placements where the parents (or district) prevailed." The MCP teaches AI how to understand how rulings and decisions are written at the BSEA and to return search results that are (hopefully) accurate.

What hasn't changed

Special Education Law and the information on the site remain free, and I believe they should remain so forever.

I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed building it,

-Dan