PHOTO: JUSTIN ALLARDYCE KNIGHT

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ... Don’t Give Up

On March 6, in Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al., v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), the Supreme Court ruled against FAIR in a challenge to the Solomon Amendment. Northeastern University School of Law participated in the effort that challenged the military’s recruiting access to law students despite the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that overtly discriminates against gay and lesbian law students.

“Obviously, we are disappointed with the Court’s ruling,” said Dean Emily Spieler.

To comply, the law school must provide the military with the same access to law students provided to all other employers — despite the fact that the military openly violates the anti-discrimination policies of Northeastern University and the School of Law.

“This law school and our graduates have been leaders in the fight against all forms of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation,” said Spieler. “We will not be silent in our acquiescence. While rejecting the First Amendment claims made by FAIR and others, the Court’s decision is quite clearly an invitation for us to engage in more speech, not less. We will continue to raise our voices against the pernicious discrimination practiced by the military.”

Summer 2006 | Newsbriefs

Freedom for All

Gordon Lecturer Sheds Light on Human Rights Struggle

Torrential rains, trembling levees, a vulnerable community left in peril, and a president seemingly unmoved by their plight — the stark images with which Professor Carol Anderson opened the 13th annual Valerie Gordon Human Rights Lecture seemed all too familiar to the audience at hand. A palpable surprise arose, however, when Anderson, an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri, revealed that she was not describing the recent events of Hurricane Katrina, but rather the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

“How could such a tragedy happen twice?” Anderson asked. “The answer is devastatingly simple. Ours is still not a society in which everyone is endowed with the same human rights.”

Anderson is author of the award-winning book, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. During her March 23 address, Anderson shed light on the time, just at the close of World War II, when the NAACP sought the “prize” of those human rights for all African Americans, going before the United Nations with a call for greater social and economic equality. Branded as communist by foes and former allies alike, the NAACP was forced to retreat and eventually narrow its focus to civil rights. The result, she suggested, is widely evident in the deep inequalities in education, health care and income that persist for African Americans today.

“Back then, the United States was trying to find a way to balance the rhetoric of freedom and democracy abroad with the realities of Jim Crow at home. We have a situation that is eerily similar today. It’s easy to talk about freedom for all, but it’s hard work to mean it. ‘All’ is a very big word.”
 — Sarah O’Brien Mackey

Legal Writing and LCD Merge into New Program

A new program, Legal Skills in Social Context (LSSC), will greet the first-year class this fall. This comprehensive training vehicle will replace both Legal Practice and Law, Culture and Difference, building on the key lawyering skills of critical thinking, writing and oral advocacy that distinguished these two programs.

“LSSC is an exciting new program that will incrementally help our first-year students build their research, writing and analytical skills,” said Associate Dean Jim Rowan, who is spearheading the development of the new program.

LSSC will continue the law school’s tradition of including a complex simulation and participation in team lawyering social justice projects, and will also place greater emphasis on exercises in written and oral exposition. In the fall, students will focus on reality-based simulations involving such complicated social issues as farm worker rights, human organ sales and procedures for entitlements to welfare benefits. The spring semester features putting those skills into practice in drafting an argument for summary judgment in a hypothetical scenario involving AIDS drug research and in preparing a team-devised detailed analysis of an issue brought to the program by a client organization. In past years, these social justice projects have served state agencies, human rights organizations, state youth courts and legal services providers.

In the new program, upper-level teaching assistants (TAs) and teaching facilitators (TFs) will be replaced with members of the bar who will serve as adjunct writing professors, working in conjunction with selected upper-level students, called lawyering fellows.

“Our TAs and TFs have been wonderful contributors to our first-year program for many years,” said Rowan. “We will continue to rely on the strength of our upper-level students as lawyering fellows, while adding the research and writing expertise of practicing members of the bar. We are thrilled that we can combine the innovative past with new, more focused priorities,” said Rowan.