Justin La Mort, 3L

Contributor

So what classes are you taking? It’s a question we ask and answer every semester but we should really start asking, “what classes do you want to take?” Last year, an invaluable team of student volunteers researched the curriculum of other law schools, conducted a campus-wide survey, drafted a proposal and worked with the administration on addressing the need for more public interest clinics and classes at Cardozo. This work was done on behalf of a virtual alphabet soup of student organizations such as Cardozo Student for Human Rights, ACS and NLG to name just a few.

What united us was the belief that our community would be better served by more options in the curriculum and greater student involvement in the selection process. While the administration was very receptive in listening to our concerns and working with us, it should not take weeks of work by dozens of students for these common sense principles to become institutionalized at our school. I would like to make two recommendations for Cardozo that could be implemented tomorrow, which would improve student involvement and create a better curriculum.

First, there should be better student input in course selection. I applaud the leadership of Tiffany Ansley with SBA and Kerry Ann Hoffman of the Student Life Committee, but more could and should be done to give students a greater voice. A few weeks ago Cardozo sent a survey by e-mail to help them with their branding. If student opinion is good enough for sweatshirts it should be good enough for the curriculum. When we conducted our poll through student groups’ list-serves we received over one hundred responses. There is nothing stopping the administration from doing the same. This process is inexpensive to implement and flexible to a student’s schedule. I don’t expect the student body to have the definitive say in new course selection but it only seems natural that its voice be heard as a factor in the decision-making process.

Second, our school still needs more clinics and classes promoting the public interest. The recent addition of a semester-long Housing Rights Clinic and courses such as Technology, Human Rights, and Equality are steps in the right direction, but more should be done. Several of our proposals from last year could be enacted, whether having a Cardozo alumnus teach a course on International Children Rights or creating a Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) Transactional Law Clinic to help us keep pace with Columbia, Brooklyn, Cornell, New York Law School and Yale, who already have established a relationship with VLA. We will one day have an ethical duty as professionals to help people in need and this pursuit of justice should be fostered to its fullest through our law school curriculum.

I don’t want these suggestions to be seen as condemnation of the administration. It has been receptive to student ideas in the past and most roadblocks have been in the form of economic and physical limitations or bureaucracy. After all, the administration wants Cardozo to succeed as much as we do. But the student perspective, as both the consumer and product of our school, gives us a different insight.

Therefore, I hope these recommendations, born from countless conversations and hours of research into the building blocks of our legal education, will open the dialogue on improving Cardozo from the class up.