When several hundred law students joined more than 10,000 lawyers at the American Bar Association's Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, in early August, money was very much on their minds. Among the resolutions considered by members of the Law Student Division was a resolution addressing a financial aid dilemma faced by many law schools and a resolution regarding the number of hours a student may work while attending law school.

The division's Assembly, made up of student bar association presidents and ABA/LSD school representatives from ABA-accredited law schools, adopted a resolution recommending that students be allowed to work up to 30 hours a week while enrolled in a full-time legal program. It narrowly rejected a resolution that would have encouraged Congress to repeal the Solomon Amendments.

Resolution 98/8-10, "Educational Funding Restrictions in the Solomon Amendments." Since 1990, the Association of American Law Schools has required that member schools which allow employers to recruit on campus demand from those employers a written statement that they do not discriminate in their hiring practices. Since the U.S. armed forces cannot meet that demand regarding sexual orientation, many law schools have prohibited military recruiters from recruiting on campus. In response, Congress passed the Solomon Amendments, which cut off federal funds—including Perkins Loans and work study monies—to schools which do not allow military recruiters on campus.

This political standoff leaves many law schools and law students with a difficult choice: take a stand against discrimination and possibly lose their federal financial aid, or abandon their principles to be able to afford law school. This resolution urged the ABA's policy-making House of Delegates to encourage the repeal of the Solomon Amendments.

Although resolution authors Melinda Fisher and Ken Wilcox of American University Washington College of Law said the resolution was not about gay rights or the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, several of the comments during the debate centered on those questions. After a lengthy debate, the resolution failed by one vote.

Resolution 98/8-12, "Student Employment." At the behest of the U.S. Department of Education, the ABA has developed guidelines to ensure that law students spend sufficient time on their studies. Currently, law students are limited to working a maximum of 20 hours a week if they go to school full time. With this resolution, the division's Assembly recommended that that figure be bumped to 30 hours per week.

During the debate, one student delegate acknowledged publicly that she works 40 hours a week while attending law school full time, even though she signed a statement saying that she would not work more than 20 hours a week. Had she not signed the pledge she would not be permitted to remain in school. Had she not worked 40 hours per week, she would not able to afford to stay in school. Most of the students who spoke in support of the resolution felt that law students are best able to determine whether they can handle a job along with law school.

The Assembly passed a related resolution—98/8-2—which urges the ABA to eliminate mandatory "residency hours." Although many law students and even law school administrators are unaware of this requirement, law schools calculate residency hours based on the number of course credit hours and employment hours per semester. This requirement can cause financial burdens for some students who have the necessary credits to graduate but lack sufficient residency hours. These students thus must take—and pay for—an extra semester of school just to meet the residency hour requirement.

Several resolutions were not contentious at all, and passed with little or no debate:

Resolution 98/8-1 encourages ABA and LSD leaders to help schools with less active ABA chapters become more active within the association.

Resolution 98/8-5 asks the ABA to require law schools to seek student input before making decisions affecting federal financial aid, and to inform their students about administration decisions that significantly affect students' access to financial aid.

Resolution 98/8-3 urges law school admissions departments to actively recruit qualified students who are underrepresented by virtue of their race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status.

Resolution 98/8-4 recommends that all ABA-accredited law schools provide students with information regarding local child care options.

Resolution 98/8-6 supports legislation providing for the accurate reporting of crimes that occur on college or university campuses.

Resolution 98/8-11 asks the ABA to call upon Congress and the Supreme Court to evaluate hiring practices of the federal judiciary, with an eye toward educating the public and the legal community about the disparate impact of current hiring practices. Proponents of the resolution quoted statistics from a recent USA Today study that revealed that 40 percent of U.S. Supreme Court law clerks graduated from Harvard or Yale law schools, and that there has never been a Native-American law clerk at the court.

Resolution 98/8-13 encourages Congress to enact legislation to allow tax deductions for all tuition expenses for higher education.

1997-98 Law Student Division Delegate Mark Morice of Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana, wrote a series of resolutions addressed to the ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. In addition to the student work hours resolution, Resolution 98/8-8 recommends that those laws schools which offer a bar exam prep course during the third year of law school be permitted to offer academic credit for the course. Resolution 98/8-9 seeks to ensure that law students understand before they arrive in law school that they must undergo a character and fitness examination to be admitted to the bar. Resolution 98/8-14 recommends that the Standards for Approval of Law Schools be changed so that law schools cannot spend more than 20 percent of the resources they generate to support non-law school activities at the university of which they are a part.

Finally, Resolution 98/8-7, "Summer Public Interest Grant Program," survived being tabled on the first day of the Assembly, and was resurrected and passed on the second day. The resolution asks the ABA to create a checkoff box on its application that would allow all ABA members to add $1 to their dues payment. These contributions would be pooled to create a grant program to fund students who want to do summer public-interest work but can't afford to take a nonpaying job. The grants would be awarded and administered by the Public Interest Committee of the division's Board of Governors.

Lee Farbman

Lee Farbman (l-farbman@nwu. edu), a third-year student at Northwestern University School of Law, is Student Lawyer's student editor.