“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”

Unfortunately, this is a phrase that all too many of us get to hear in our lives. In many sectors, including academia, it has become the “trump card” in how students and faculty think they can get a dispute resolved their way: threaten to get “the lawyers” involved, and people cave.

If you practice the healing arts and teach others who will do the same, your objective is to care for patients and teach students to do so; but you will not always be able to help individuals as much as you (or they) will like, and sometimes there will be an adverse result. In academia, there will be disputes—about agreements allegedly made, quality of services rendered, costs incurred, attitudes expressed. With our society becoming increasingly diverse, the opportunities for misunderstanding—and causing offense—are expanding rapidly.

The law is the framework that allows each of us to deal with others in a predictable way.¹ For centuries, the courts have been where disputes were resolved. Our modern legal practices date back over eight centuries to England in 1215 and the Magna Carta—a reform imposed upon the king by the populace, which, among many other things, guaranteed that disputes between the people would be decided by the people themselves in their own community, in public. This system of justice—trial by jury—remains the dominant feature of American law, but it is no longer the primary way that disputes are resolved. In most cases and for most people, lawyers and courts are too formal, too slow, and too expensive. But they are always there, waiting for when other methods fail.

The first chapter discusses rights and claims, the different ways they get resolved, and the process that dispute resolution typically takes. The next chapters provide a quick overview of the legal principles and specific laws that all nursing faculty need to know and provide some instruction on how to read “a case.” Then the role of university counsel is addressed. The remaining chapters analyze academic nursing cases in order to provide the reader with legal background, prevention tips, and resources to navigate common and not-so-common legal issues in nursing education. Society has become increasingly litigious. This book will serve as a resource to aspiring nursing faculty, current faculty, and academic administrators on how to manage legal issues encountered in their daily professional lives.

This book, Legal and Ethical Issues in Nursing Education: An Essential Guide was conceptualized based on a previous book which bears a similar name, Legal Issues Confronting Today’s Nursing Faculty: A Case-Study Approach. This text provides aspiring nursing faculty, current faculty, and academic administrators with practical advice on how to deal with the vast array of legal issues that arise in nursing education. These issues are rarely addressed in the literature, and faculty often struggle with how to solve some of the legal issues they confront daily in the classroom and clinical environment. This book assists faculty in making real-life decisions about academic issues such as harassment, discrimination, academic dishonesty, and conflict of interest, with the legal bases in mind. The two nursing faculty authors, Drs. Mary Ellen Smith Glasgow and H. Michael Dreher, have extensive backgrounds in academic nursing administration (as Chair, Associate Dean, Dean, and Associate Provost); management of large, complex nursing programs; and expertise in the faculty role. The university attorney author, John Gyllenhammer, has served as chief attorney responsible for all legal matters affecting a College of Medicine, College of Nursing and Health Professions, and a School of Public Health at a large, private university for 20 years. The authors offer their knowledgeable perspectives on how to address simple and complex nursing academic legal issues based on their collective experience. A unique feature of this book is Section II: The Ethics Dimension of Legal and Ethical Issues in Nursing Education, written by philosopher and ethicist, Michael D. Dahnke. Dr. Dahnke provides an ethical perspective to each legal case study presented throughout the book.

Whether you are a new or seasoned nursing professor/academic, nursing administrator, or graduate student taking a master’s or doctoral nursing program in legal issues in nursing education course, we believe this text can serve as an important guide for your career. The nursing education environment today is complex and challenging. Navigating the legal issues that every faculty member will at some point face (regardless of role) requires, at minimum, some familiarity with critical higher education legal issues and their management, in addition to attention to the ethical considerations.