Despite decades of research, bullying is still a significant international problem for schools and teachers from an educational and legal perspective. Moreover, the advance of technology has brought new and complex challenges for schools and teachers. Very few studies in Ireland bring the disciplines of education and law together in the way that this study does. The combination of these two disciplines makes an important contribution in the area of bullying. The duty of care that schools owe to their students ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of school is uncertain and evolving. Most of the research on bullying has grown from the seminal work by Dan Olweus in the 1970s yet as society and technology has advanced so has bullying. The strength of the study is its analytical focus in both disciplines. Since the teachers’ role is so important in combatting bullying it only makes sense to capture their thoughts in order to help improve future prevention and intervention programs. My study is a transformative, critical, policy-oriented thesis which explored second-level teachers’ perceptions of bullying and duty of care from an education and legal perspective. The overall objective of this qualitative study was to gain deep insight into how second-level teachers in Ireland understand factors such as: duty of care, student empathy (teachers’ expression of empathy for students), institutional stressors such as curriculum burden and law/policy. Moreover, this study also considers whether such aspects influence their attitude to prevent and intervene in bullying inside and outside of school. The study used semi-structured interviews with twenty nine second-level teachers in Ireland (18 females and 11 males.) Thematic analysis was used to draw themes from the data. The research findings suggest fragmented understandings of: duty of care, bullying, children’s rights, law and policy. The teacher attitudes captured in the data, reflect ad hoc approaches to duty of care relative to bullying. Central to these findings was a feeling from teachers of being overwhelmed with the scale and pace of educational change. Thus, this study is not only significant for researchers but also: teachers, schools, boards of management, teacher unions, policy makers, legal professionals, parents, principals, management bodies, providers of ITE and teacher CPD.