Litigation
6 nodes · event (ufo)
A decided case testing some part of the education funding system against constitutional text. It is an Event because it unfolds over an interval and has temporal parts — filing, trial judgment, appeal, decision, and in Ohio’s central case a sequence of four separate decisions and a remand the court later withdrew jurisdiction over. Litigation is kept separate from legislation because the causal arrow between them runs both ways and needs to be traversable in each direction.
Nodes
| Cincinnati City School District Board of Education v. Walter (1979) | The Supreme Court of Ohio's first modern encounter with the school funding question, decided 4-3 for the state. Disparity in district resources did not by itself establish a failure of the duty to provide a statewide system of common schools. |
|---|---|
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph I, 1997) | The decision that changed the terms of Ohio school funding. On 24 March 1997 the Supreme Court of Ohio held, 4-3, that the funding system violated Article VI, Section 2, and ordered a complete systematic overhaul within one year. |
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph II, 2000) | The decision that said what thorough and efficient actually means, which is why the phrase is operable here rather than merely quoted. The General Assembly's response to DeRolph I had not produced a compliant system. |
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph III, 2001) | The only one of the four decisions in which the court told the General Assembly what to change arithmetically, and the only one later erased. It found H.B. 94 would meet the test with four prescribed modifications, then was vacated. |
| DeRolph v. State (DeRolph IV, 2002) | The last of the four DeRolph decisions, and the one that matters most for where Ohio is now. It vacated DeRolph III, reinstated DeRolph I and II as controlling, and released jurisdiction without ever finding compliance. |
| EdChoice Constitutional Challenge (Franklin County, 2025) | A challenge to Ohio's EdChoice scholarship programs brought by a coalition of public school districts, decided in their favor in Franklin County on 24 June 2025 in a 47-page decision holding the program unconstitutional. |
Properties
What a litigation may carry.
| Property | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Case name | string | Short case name as commonly cited |
| Citation | string | Reporter citation |
| Court | string | Deciding court |
| Filed | date | Date the action was commenced |
| Decided | date | Date of the decision this node records |
| Holding | text | What the court held, and on what constitutional ground |
| Remedy | text | What relief was ordered, and whether it was complied with |
| Procedural history | text | The path the case took — filings, remands, and rehearings — where later decisions cannot be read without it. Not required: a case decided once, on the pleadings it was filed on, has no path to record. |
Relationships
The edges this class may enter into. Out is declared by the node itself; in is declared by the node at the other end.
| Relationship | To | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Challenges out | Funding Regime | The regime whose constitutionality was at issue |
| Challenges out | Funding Program | A program whose lawfulness was at issue, as distinct from a whole regime |
| Cites out | Litigation | A prior decision this one builds on, narrows, or reaffirms |
| Invokes out | Doctrine | A normative principle the court reasoned from |
| Prompts out | Legislation | An enactment passed in response to this decision |
| Decided by in | Institutional Actor | The court that issued the decision |
| Has as a party in | Education Agency | An agency that was a named party |