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This Note examines a widespread but barely acknowledged phenomenon within education law: the recent enactment, in all fifty states, of statutes and standards regarding students' social and emotional learning within public schools. Despite significant empirical evidence that curricular and disciplinary interventions targeting students' social and emotional skills are effective at building these skills and, in turn, enhancing students' academic and long-term outcomes, this Note argues that social and emotional learning should not be legislated. Drawing on James Scott's seminal critique of processes of state rationalization and Jal Mehta's application of this critique to education policy, this Note shows that the push to enact, implement, and enforce social-emotional learning laws should be questioned and, where possible, reversed: first, because it is counterproductive; and second, because it infringes upon longstanding constitutional protections of parental rights and familial autonomy. Recognizing that the repeal of these laws is unlikely, however, the Note also provides recommendations for how their enforcement may be cabined so as to minimize harmful legal and social effects. More broadly, this Note is a case study of the fluid boundaries between law and policy, providing a preliminary theoretical framework to understand the relationship between the two and a set of critical analytics for determining when one is preferable to the other.

As the boarders of territories change, administrative territorial reform can cause problems in data comparison over longer time period. The goal of this paper is to offer methodology how to compare data about territories before and after administrative territorial reform. This paper includes both reviews of previous attempts of data comparisons as well as it proposes a couple of principles that could make such a comparison more reliable and easy to use.The proposed methodology tests on the data of Latvia (for the period from 2001 to 2011) because in 2009 Latvia experienced administrative territorial reform and the structure of municipalities changed significantly. Before there were more than 500 municipalities (called pagasts), later – 119 county municipalities (novads).To test the accuracy of this method of comparison, it is applied to enable budget expenditure comparison by using panel data fixed effects models. These models evaluate which factors (such as budget revenue, municipality and parliament elections etc.) influence municipality budget expenditures in different years. Calculations are made for full period as well as those periods before and after the reform in such a way analyzing variable influence changes and evaluating their strength and stability. Results prove that two main principles that describes previous data summarizing and proxy variable combinations are applicable and allow extending the period of data analysis.The main novelty of this research is elaborated simple, easy to use system for territory comparison specific in Latvia before and after administrative territorial reform, but it could be applied also to other countries with similar data problems.