Law Panel Considers Freer Club Admissions

The Law School's Joint Faculty-Student Committee is considering a plan which would revamp the way students are chosen for the School's extracurricular activities.

Under the plan, some places on the School's highly prestigious "honoraries"--the Law Review, the Board of Student Advisor, and the Legal Aid Society--would be reserved for students who aren't among the top 55 members of their class. Only the top 55 are chosen for these activities now.

But the major goal of those who drafted the proposal is not so much to change the character of the "honoraries" as to attract more members to the non-honorary societies--those which choose their members largely on the basis of interest.

The new proposal would let all students in the top quarter of their class bid for an organization of their choice, which could be either honorary or non-honorary. Each organization would then select some, but not all, of its members from among these applicants -- leaving the room open for students below the top quarter to compete for membership.

But organizations which were over-subscribed with applicants -- and the prestigious Law Review probably would be--would still take only the highest ranked students. Thus the Law Review would very likely still be composed of the 25 students at the top of their class. The plan, however, suggests that the Law Review open an additional five places and fill them by competition.

The committee has sent copies of the report to the faculty and the extracurricular organizations for their suggestions. It will now evaluate the recommendations and submit a final report to Erwin N, Griswold, Dean of the Law School.

Ultimate adoptation of the new system would rest with the organizations themselves, since most of them possess a considerable degree of sutonomy.

The drafters of the proposal hope that it will broaden the activities of the "honoraries" by making them compete for members. They also expect it to increase the prestige of the non-honorary organizations, because every organization will now have some members from the top quarter of the class.

"By making part of every organization grade-based, we hope to invest with equivalent value the places to be offered on a non-grade basis," the committee stated.

They also felt that there was a considerable amount of frustration among students who did not rank high enough to join one of the three honoraries. By creating the possibility of membership not based on rank, they hope to ease this frustration.

The group -- a subcommittee made up of six students and one faculty member--also made an independent, but complementary proposal calling for the creation of a Harvard Journal of Legal Reform. All law students would be eligible to write for the Journal without regard to grades or any form of prior competition.

The subcommittee hopes that the Journal will eventually become "a publication capable of challenging the pre-eminent appeal of the Law Review," but its primary goal would be to give more students the opportunity to do legal writing