Schaffer Ex Rel. Schaffer v. Weast
The Court ruled that in disputes over a disabled child's special-education plan, the parent or school district who requests the hearing and asks for a change is the one who has to prove their case, just as in ordinary lawsuits.
Because most hearing requests come from parents challenging a school's plan, this means parents will usually bear the burden of showing the plan is inadequate rather than schools having to prove it is adequate, a rule that applies nationwide except where states have separately decided otherwise.
How it got here: An administrative law judge sided with the school district; a federal district court reversed on the burden-of-proof question, and the Fourth Circuit ultimately ruled for the school district before the Supreme Court took the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Brian Schaffer, a child with learning disabilities and speech-language impairments, struggled in a private school through seventh grade. When his parents sought a public school placement, Montgomery County's schools proposed an educational plan the parents felt was inadequate. The parents instead enrolled Brian in a different private school and sought a hearing challenging the plan, asking the school district to pay for the private tuition.
The question before the Court
When a parent challenges whether their disabled child's special-education plan is adequate at an administrative hearing, does the parent or the school district have to prove their case?
The Court's answer
Parents (or whichever side asks for the hearing) generally bear the burden of proving their case. The Court applied the ordinary default rule from civil litigation — the party seeking to change the status quo and asking for relief must prove its claim — because Congress's special-education law never said otherwise, and nothing about the law's structure or purpose justified a different rule.
The Court rejected arguments that schools should always have to justify their plans, noting that Congress had already leveled the playing field by giving parents rights to school records, independent evaluations, and attorney's fees if they win. Since most hearings are requested by parents challenging a school's plan, the practical effect is that parents will typically have to show the plan is inadequate, though states remain free to adopt their own rules placing the burden on school districts instead.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Millions of families with disabled children who dispute a school's special-education plan will now know they generally must come forward with evidence to prove the plan is inadequate, rather than assuming the school must defend it. School districts, meanwhile, do not automatically have to justify every plan they propose unless a parent or the district itself challenges it and the case is genuinely close.
What changes now
This is a final decision on the merits resolving the burden-of-proof question, though the Fourth Circuit's judgment affirming the school district is left in place. The ruling leaves room for individual states to adopt their own rules placing the burden on school districts instead, since the Court noted Maryland had no such rule and declined to decide whether states could override the default. Future disputes will apply this default rule unless state law says otherwise.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether states may pass their own laws or regulations placing the burden of persuasion on school districts instead of parents, since Maryland had no such rule; several states do have such rules, and the Court expressly left that separate question open.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens joined the majority's outcome but stressed that no single rule solves every case where a statute is silent on the burden of proof — courts may still weigh policy, convenience, and fairness to place the burden on a defendant in other contexts. He agreed with much of Justice Ginsburg's reasoning about the special nature of this statute, but ultimately sided with the majority because he believes courts should presume public school officials are properly performing their duties.
Dissent — Justice Ginsburg
“Policy considerations, convenience, and fairness, I think it plain, point in the same direction.”Ginsburg's summary conclusion that fairness favors placing the burden on school districts instead of parents.
Justice Ginsburg argued that policy considerations, convenience, and fairness all point toward placing the burden of persuasion on school districts rather than parents. She emphasized that schools have far better access to information, expertise, and resources, and that requiring schools to justify their plans would create a stronger incentive to design genuinely adequate plans from the outset. She would have reversed the Fourth Circuit's judgment.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer argued that Congress never actually decided who bears the burden of persuasion, instead leaving that procedural question entirely to the states as part of the law's cooperative-federalism structure. Because Maryland had no specific rule on the issue, he would have sent the case back for the state administrative law judge to determine how Maryland's own administrative law rules apply, rather than imposing a uniform federal default rule.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court looked to the text of the federal special-education law and found it silent about which side must prove its case at a hearing challenging a child's education plan, so it turned to the ordinary default rule used across many areas of law.
- That default rule assigns the burden of persuasion — meaning which side loses if the evidence is evenly balanced — to whichever party is asking a court or hearing officer to change the existing state of affairs, since that party is the one seeking relief.
- The Court considered and rejected the parents' argument that schools should always bear this burden because schools have superior access to information about a child's education, noting that Congress had already addressed that imbalance by giving parents rights to review school records, obtain an independent evaluation, and recover attorney's fees if they win.
- The Court also rejected the argument that placing the burden on schools would better serve the law's goals, reasoning that the statute nowhere assumes every proposed plan is invalid until the school proves otherwise, and that the law's design presumes schools acting in good faith will prevail when their plans are sound.
- Applying the default rule, the Court concluded that whichever party — parent or school district — asks for the hearing and seeks to change the current plan bears the burden of persuasion, and here that party was Brian's parents.