Law School Charter - General Background

In 2008, the governing council of the law school passed an amendment to the charter, which made law school governance more flexible. The old version of the charter proved to be unwieldy. It required that all decisions be voted on in the governing council. This caused significant delays in each committee's ability to make decisions. The amendment attempted to alleviate some of these delays by making the committees more flexible.

A copy of the law school charter is available here: NUSL Charter 2008

Unfortunately, the amendment also caused several problems within the committees. Relevant to us, the amendment allowed for some committees to ignore the student voice. Committee chairs could decide whether the students could vote on its decisions.

In May 2010, the law school charter will revert to the old version. Before this happens, the SBA and several interested students are working together to help draft a new law school charter. Our goals are to create a law school governance structure which includes students in the decision-making processes. We want to ensure that the goals of governance and the committee structures are defined in such a way to make sure that our elected leaders have a voice in law school governance.

We will use this blog to ensure that all of our decisions regarding law school governance are transparent. We encourage you to use this page to check up on the activities of the student committee responsible for discussing how we define our role in the law school. Please feel free to comment on any of these posts. We want your suggestions, as students of the law school. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible so we can include everyone in this process.