Matthew Patrick Shaw has received the Education Law Association’s Steven S. Goldberg Award for his 2022 Chicago Law Review article, “The Public Right to Education.” Shaw will be recognized at the Education Law Association’s annual conference on Oct. 27.
The award is presented annually in recognition of an outstanding article, book, book chapter, or other form of scholarly legal writing in the field of education law. The award is named after the late Steven S. Goldberg, an ELA member, professor of education, and the Educational Leadership Program Coordinator at Arcadia University.
Previous award winners include University of Virginia President James E. Ryan Jr. and former Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow.
In his article, Shaw makes three novel claims:
- First, he proposes that “public rights” differ from “fundamental rights” because public rights are based in state-created positive law while fundamental rights are enumerated or implied by the federal Constitution.
- Second, he identifies public education as the archetypical public right because state laws have given each eligible school child a legitimate claim to free school access, usage, and educational praxis.
- Third, he argues that these aspects of public education make it a form of regulatory property that the federal Constitution protects through due process.
The sum of these propositions provides a means to address what Shaw terms “one of the constitutional law’s most intractable problems”—that public education “is the most important function of state and local government,” yet one to which the federal courts have not yet extended constitutional protections.
Shaw joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2022, having previously served on the faculty of Vanderbilt Peabody College since 2017. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of federal law and education policy. His current projects investigate the constitutional status of rights to education across the K-20 lifecycle and the rights of vulnerable and marginalized members of the education ecology, including undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ school-aged youth, and historically Black K-12 and higher-educational spaces.
He holds a J.D. from Columbia University and earned his Ed.D. and Ed.M. degrees at Harvard University. He earned his A.B. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After earning his law degree, he was a law clerk for then-Chief Judge W. Louis Sands of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia before practicing law in Atlanta. He was also a fellow with the American Bar Foundation and the Law and Society Association.
In addition to serving as an assistant professor of law, Shaw holds a secondary appointment as an assistant professor of public policy and education. He recently completed a three-year term as a Trustee of the Law and Society Association and currently serves on the board of directors for the John Mercer Langston Workshop.
