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Student Judiciary to provide legal counsel
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The Student Judiciary of the Associated Students of Madison passed an amendment Sunday to provide legal counsel to the petitioners in their court.
SJ has been considering appointing an outreach counsel to help registered student organizations go through legal proceedings with the Student Services Finance Committee or another RSO since early last semester.
“It will be a person that will act as a resource for individuals and organizations that would like to appeal decisions through Associated Students of Madison,” SJ Chief Justice Sol Grosskopf said.
According to Grosskopf, the position is needed because SJ’s legal processes can be very complicated.
“We do have a complicated system of rules and processes … and ways to appeal, and we as justices, as the arbitrators, can’t really assist people as they work their way through,” Grosskopf said. “If we have a resource to send them to, then the organizations and people have a resource to understand the processes that they have to go through to make their viewpoints heard in a legible form that goes before our body.”
SJ Vice Chief Justice Shaun Hernandez said the inspiration for the position came from SSFC.
“One of the things that drove us to do this is the fact that SSFC has their own counsel that they use for cases,” Hernandez said. “SSFC is a pretty perennial respondent for SJ cases, and they have their counsel that does all the research.”
According to Hernandez, the group wanted an analogue to provide to groups that are petitioning against SSFC or any other group. He said they wanted petitioners to have available to them the same resources and knowledge that SSFC has.
“In short, it provides an equal footing for both parties that appear before our court,” Grosskopf said.
SJ still needs to work out details of the new position, Hernandez said, and they plan to discuss the exact duties of the outreach counsel, including whether it will speak for the group and, in the case of two different RSOs, whether the counsel will provide support to both parties.
“That is kind of the reason that we didn’t want to make the outreach counsel an advocate in the strictest sense … that when they take on a specific case or advocate for a specific group, they are completely and only bound to that group,” Hernandez said. “If one RSO were filing against another RSO, I guess, in theory, that outreach counsel could help both groups.”
According to Grosskopf, as of now, the counsel will be a resource to help facilitate and help the organization in their own defense.
“It is not to work solely for the defense. It is simply a resource,” he said.
The amendment was passed twice by SJ, and will be sent to Student Council in the next few weeks to be approved as an amendment to ASM bylaws.
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“Lisa, student government is meaningless. Your constitution is written on the back of a napkin.”—Principal Seymour Skinner
… and the parts about the Student Judiciary are really a food smudge that they misinterpreted.
Folks, let’s face it, the entire ASM organization is a front for Wiley that doesn’t follow their own constitution, bylaws, and case law. Wisconsin shared governance statutes don’t require the existence of ASM, so we should really throw it into a ditch and get on with our merry lives.