While its future is not yet certain, the president of its board of directors, Luis Miranda, said on Tuesday that the group was in talks to merge with the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, which two weeks ago won a $500 million judgment in its own long-standing school-financing litigation, known as the Abbott case.
Campaign finance litigation, like politics itself, produces strange bedfellows.
The Kansas decision was refreshing, but it is not the end of school finance litigation.
That is wrong, said John C. Bonifaz, executive director of the National Voting Rights Institute, a nonprofit group specializing in campaign finance litigation.
He went on to create BlackRobe Capital Partners, which helped finance litigation against big corporations, but he closed the company recently before joining Mr. Tourre's legal team.
It has financed litigation accusing Cintas of not paying overtime to its drivers and of illegally firing workers for supporting a union, accusations that the company denies.
The remaining $15 million will be used to finance litigation against Enron executives, Andersen's auditors in the United States and Enron's investment bankers and lawyers, court papers say.
By contrast, the first major wave of school-finance litigation, in the early 1970's, sought so-called "fiscal equity," which required that all school districts be funded equally.
IMF, an Australian firm that finances litigation in return for a share of the proceeds if the litigation succeeds, has announced it will finance a similar action in the Netherlands.
Yet even as the latest round of school finance litigation goes to trial this fall, it appears there is reason for optimism about the number of students leaving high school with a diploma.
