DeRolph Litigation Record
derolph-litigation-record · cited by 6 nodes
Source. Supreme Court of Ohio opinion archive (supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs) for the
opinions themselves; the Bricker Graydon Chronology of the DeRolph v. Ohio School Funding
Litigation (bricker.com) for the procedural sequence; the Legislative Service Commission
Members Brief DeRolph v. State School Funding Case for the legislative-facing summary.
Type. Primary source (opinions) with two secondary compilations.
What it contains. The full twelve-year record of DeRolph v. State — filing in Perry County on 19 December 1991, the 1993 trial before Judge Linton Lewis Jr. (70+ witnesses, 500+ exhibits), the 1994 trial ruling, the 1995 reversal on appeal, four Supreme Court of Ohio decisions, and the 2003 writ of prohibition that ended it.
The chronology is the reason this entry exists separately from the opinions. The sequence is easy to get wrong from the opinions alone, and one step in particular is routinely misdescribed: DeRolph IV did not simply reaffirm the earlier holdings — it vacated DeRolph III and reinstated DeRolph I and II as controlling law. Any account that treats the four decisions as cumulative is wrong about what the operative holding is.
Access constraints. The four opinions are freely available with WebCite citations, and are no longer only available: all four are retrieved, digest-pinned in the manifest, and committed as a text extract. The Bricker chronology is a law-firm publication — reliable on procedure, but a secondary source, and claims drawn from it are tagged accordingly rather than as verified primary text. The LSC Members Brief PDF is served from a host whose TLS chain does not validate through standard fetching; retrieve it by other means or cite the opinions directly.
Trial-level rulings are a different matter and are not reachable from this source: a common pleas decision is not in the supreme court’s archive, which is why the 2025 EdChoice ruling stays sourced to reporting.
The archive is not only DeRolph’s, and the EdChoice case has one decision in it. The Reporter
publishes the supreme court, all twelve district courts of appeals and the Court of Claims — so
Columbus City School Dist. v. State, 2024-Ohio-1217 (10th Dist.), is here at the same URL shape
as the four DeRolph opinions, and is now held: crates/regime-diff/fixtures/edchoice-appellate-record.txt.
It is an interlocutory appeal about a deposition subpoena and it decides nothing about EdChoice,
but it states the caption and the trial court case number, both of which the corpus was carrying
as [open].
Why the 2025 merits ruling still is not here is now a narrower statement than “not in the archive”. The Reporter publishes no common pleas court at all. The Franklin County Clerk of Courts does publish it, and its conditions of use say the data “is not intended for distribution by other persons, entities or organizations” and direct organizations to a public records request. That is a license, not a wall. See “What a citator reaches”.
Caveat. Counts of “how many DeRolph rulings” differ across sources — four Supreme Court decisions plus a 1997 clarification and the 2003 prohibition action, which some summaries count as five or six events. This corpus models the four numbered decisions and describes the clarification and the prohibition inside the relevant nodes.
Also read by
crates/regime-diff/fixtures/derolph-opinions.txt— the committed extract of all four opinions, one record per case.- Local Share Charge-Off Millage — DeRolph I ¶97 is the source for the charge-off rate progression and its Ohio Laws citations, which is the one place this corpus uses the opinions as a statutory record rather than a judicial one. Ohio Laws’ online archive for R.C. 3317.022 starts in 2014, after the mechanism was retired, so the opinion is the accessible text.