Educators and the public believe that it is exceedingly difficult to terminate incompetent teachers because of their legal protections in federal civil rights law, state tenure laws, and--even for states that do not have tenure laws-- the procedural and substantive requirements that are specific to performance evaluation in state and local policies. Under the current versions of school reform, which put a high priority on high-quality teachers and student achievement test results, evaluation for the purposes of merit pay or, more generally, continuing employment, has received renewed attention. Do the court decisions concerning dismissal on the basis of teacher evaluation support the common conception that school district leaders face an exceedingly high hurdle? Does the case law suggest that revised teacher evaluation systems that have more daunting criteria and rigorous procedures--such as student test scores and more frequent observations--are unlikely to withstand challenges in court? Most of the literature in the education field is normative, providing relatively high standards for teacher evaluation. Such best-practice views either inadvertently or deliberately skew the state of the law in an effort to be proactive and to minimize false negatives--that is, indefensible dismissals for incompetent performance according to procedural or substantive problems with a teacher's evaluation. The legal realities may be different; the synthesis presented in this article is based on an objective, exhaustive, up-to-date, and systematic review of the case law during the past three decades.