ABSTRACT
Education law has evolved over the last 15 or so years into a distinct and widely accepted category of academic law and legal practice. No longer simply an aspect of public, welfare, tort or family law, it now has its own specialist practitioners, legal associations,1 case reports,2 law journals,3 and textbooks and courses within the legal curriculum. It is possible to view this development as both a process of consolidation and as a response to the dramatic increase in education related litigation. While not denying these simple explanations I want to argue for a more critical engagement. My starting point is a refusal to accept that the categorisation of education law as a distinct discipline is purely functional or simply a matter of ‘common sense’ convenience. A central premise to this approach is an understanding of law as not simply functional but productive, which is to say that education law does not simply determine where, when and how a child, as a pre-given psychological subject, should be educated, but that it plays an important role in the construction of childhood subjectivities.4 Adopting this approach, I attempt to demonstrate that exploring the boundaries to education law and refusing to accept the subject/object of education law as a pre-given entity provides insights into contemporary notions of childhood and educational practice.
