CUNY School of Law Honored for Public Service
The Law Student Division's Judy M. Weightman Memorial Public Interest School of the Year Award went to the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law.
The award was announced last August at the division's Annual Meeting. The Public Interest Committee of the division's Board of Governors chooses the winner. "This application blew me away," says Committee Chair Timothy Tuttle, Eighth Circuit governor and a student at the University of Nebraska College of Law. "This year's winner distinguished themselves with many unique and innovative programs. It wasn't just the diversity of the programs, but the number, too."
For example, CUNY's Indo-American Law Students Association ran a program to help foreign nationals apply for U.S. visas and citizenship. Another program sent law students to help domestic violence victims navigate the court system to obtain protective orders. The school ran an elder law clinic. The CUNY Children's Rights Association ran a mentoring program for children from a local center for families. It was modeled on the Big Brothers-Big Sisters program.
The division's public interest award is named for the late Judy Weightman, a professor at the William S. Richardson Law School at the University of Hawaii who died of breast cancer a year ago. Weightman had received numerous awards from bar and community groups in Hawaii for her advocacy on behalf of minorities and the poor. She also received the Law Student Division's Dean Henry Ramsey Jr. Award for promoting the full and equal participation in the legal profession by minorities and women.
Besides selecting the winner of the Weightman Award, the Public Interest Committee chooses the theme for Work-A-Day, the Law Student Division's annual fall public interest project day. Last October the theme was "reaching out, building awareness" (of disabled members of the community).
At its Annual Meeting last August, the division passed a resolution urging the American Bar Association to create a grant program to fund law students doing summer work in the public interest. That resolution is awaiting action from the ABA's House of Delegates. The committee also is trying to build links to other sections within the ABA and, in particular, to the sections' pro bono committees.
The committee also is responsible for "Countdown 2000," the division's effort to count the number of public service hours law students are putting in nationwide. Each law school is asked to tally the public interest hours its student organizations put in and submit the number to the division's office in Chicago. Any public interest work for which students are not paid qualifies, including law school clinics for which students receive academic credit. Work performed in fulfillment of a law school's mandatory pro bono requirement counts as well.
The Judy M. Weightman Memorial Public Interest School of the Year Award is given to a law school each year based on the degree of its commitment to public interest work: mandatory pro bono, volunteer programs, clinics, public interest organizations, loan forgiveness programs, career services and financial aid for public interest jobs; student participation and reaction to public interest work; and faculty and administration reaction to public interest.
Nominations are due April 15. Call the Law Student Division's offices at 312/988-5624 or visit the division's Web site at http://www.abanet.org/lsd for more information.
Lee Farbman
Lee Farbman, a third-year stu-dent at Northwestern University School of Law, is Student Lawyer's student editor.
