State legislatures throughout the country have been toughening up their anti-bully laws in the naive belief that making bullying illegal is going to make it disappear. Furthermore, what these laws do is hold the school legally responsible for making the bullying among kids disappear. While these laws cannot possibly magically make bullying stop, they do make it easy for parents to sue schools for failing to make the bullying stop. As a result, the US (and the rest of the modern world) is experiencing a surge in lawsuits by disgruntled parents against their children's schools.

I have been warning for the last decade that these laws are the schools' worst enemy...that they won't eliminate bullying, but that they can eliminate schools by forcing them into bankruptcy. Schools have paid up to $4.5 million dollars to plaintiffs in individual cases. (Actually, the schools would not go bankrupt because it's the taxpayers–you and I–who end up footing the bill in these astronomical settlements.)