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Category Archives: Students
NALSA Golf Tournament – SAVE THE DATE!
Breann Swann presents at Tokyo conference
Breann Yoshiko Swann, an LL.M. student in the Indian Legal Program, will give a presentation on Aug. 28 in Tokyo as part of the United Nations University/UNESCO 2008 Conference on Globalization and Languages, which will explore the contribution of linguistic diversity and multilingualism to development and their value for dialogue, social cohesion and peace. Swann will speak on “Changing the Language of Industry: Setting Standards for the Protection of Indigenous Languages in the Workplace.” Swann’s presentation explores the role that language use in the workplace plays in preserving indigenous languages.
“Research suggests that, absent revitalization efforts, 155 of the approximately 175 extant Native American languages in the United States will die by the year 2060,” according to Swann’s presentation abstract. “The prognosis for the remaining indigenous languages in other parts of the world is, for the most part, equally grim.”
While there are some efforts to preserve indigenous language, those efforts are focused on education and domestic and social use, Swann writes. Meanwhile, industry and employers are moving to a largely monolingual global workplace. Swann argues that the presence of indigenous language in the workplace may be crucial to its survival and analyzes different instruments that could be used to protect language in the employment sphere. The conference is organized by the United Nations University, established by the United Nations, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Swann is a licensed attorney practicing in the areas of federal Indian law and labor and employment law. She currently works for the Office of the General Counsel of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where she provides strategic advice and counsel regarding various aspects of tribal governance. Her work with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community focuses primarily on tribal labor and employment matters and the development of tribal ordinances and policies. Building upon her practical legal experience, she has concentrated her recent scholarship on the social and political ramifications of language policies and practices in the workplace. She received her J.D. from the University of Southern California and her B.A. from Yale University. She will receive her LL.M. in Tribal Policy, Law and Government from the College of Law in May 2009. Prior to entering the field of Indian law, she was a practitioner of labor and employment law in the Los Angeles office of Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP.
Class of 2008
Congratulations to Dan Lewis (1L)!
Congratulations to Dan Lewis (1L) for receiving two honors this month!
Dan was selected as one of the four 2008 AAABA Thomas Tang Scholarship Award recipients and will receive a $2,000 scholarship.
Dan was also named a 2008 Cohen Professionalism Scholar. See article below about the Cohen Scholars.
Congratulations Dan!
Cohen Scholars named at Law School
Posing with (far left) Dean Patricia White and (far right) Maricopa CountySuperior Court Bruce R. Cohen and Loren Cohen are the 2008 CohenProfessionalism Scholars at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law,(left to right) Amy M. Coughenour, Daniel A. Lewis, Meghan McCauley,Natalie Greaves and Alison Atwater. For their prize-winning essays abou tintegrity, the students received scholarship money from the Cohens andwill visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles this summer.
Meghan McCauley, a first-year law student at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, recently was chosen as the winner of the 2008 Cohen Professionalism Scholars competition, based on an essay she wrote about integrity. McCauley, whose essay was entitled, “Commandment 10: Honor who you are and you will bring honor to what you do,” received a $1,000 scholarship from the sponsors of the contest, Loren Cohen and Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce R. Cohen, an alumnus of the College of Law. The Cohens awarded second place and a $500 scholarship to Alison Atwater, and honorable mentions, along with $250 scholarships, to Amy M. Coughenour, Natalie Greaves and Daniel A. Lewis. The Cohens will be taking the students to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in June. This is the third annual presentation of the awards. The Cohens visited the law school on Tuesday, April 8, to give the awards and to talk about the topic of the essay competition, integrity. “Integrity is not a black and white issue,” Judge Cohen said. “Integrity is the result of the struggle that goes on in your own mind and how you act upon those thoughts.” He showed a clip from the movie, The Rainmaker, in which actor Matt Damon portrays a young lawyer who is faced with right and wrong. Paraphrasing from the film, Judge Cohen noted that “every lawyer in every case has the opportunity to cross the line, and if you cross the line one too many times, it frequently disappears, and then you become a lawyer joke.” He encouraged the students to let their own standards be the highest against which they will be judged. “Every single day you have the opportunity to start with a clean slate – no matter what you did in the past, you choose what gets written on that slate,” Judge Cohen said. “No one can compromise your integrity, no one can tell you what to do.” The entire Class of 2010 submitted essays to the Cohens, writing about the greatest moral dilemmas they’d ever faced and how they were resolved. The Cohens said the submissions were entertaining and inspiring, making the judging very difficult. “If you’re not called up here, you nonetheless have inspired us and raised our optimism for the legal profession for the future,” Judge Cohen said. McCauley’s essay recounted her internal struggle with telling the truth about her past indiscretions when applying to get in to the Air Force, and risk not only being rejected, but bringing dishonor to three prior military generations of her family, or lying about her past and being admitted. “We never realize the dark skeletons we have in our closets until we are asked to fill out a character and fitness report, asking everything from, did we ever pull someone’s hair in the first grade to whether or not we took a sip of alcohol prior to the day we turned twenty one to whether or not we had committed misdemeanors or worse felonies,” McCauley wrote. To find out her decision, read her essay here. Atwater wrote a poem, “How Inmate Forty-Five Earned His Stripes,” a Dr. Seuss-metered, first-person view of a lawyer who was caught fudging a deal. The attorney’s conscience and guilt battle back and forth in the prose:
“I started with values, But where did they go? How the error escaped me I never will know.
I thought it was worth it To get where I was, But right has one reason, And that’s “Just because.” “So hand me that bucket, That mop and that pail. I must finish cleaning The floor of this jail.
To read Atwater’s poem, click here. Coughenour had no problem coming up with a topic for her essay. “Frankly, I’m jealous of whatever percentage of the class has to manufacture a problem to have something to write about,” she wrote. “In my 31 years, I’ve made so many moral and ethical decisions that I can hardly keep track, any one of which would be fertile ground for discussion here. The one she chose relates to the difficulty of being a law student and a single mother of three young girls and a proposal from her parents to allow the children to live with them during the week. She weighed the pros and cons, a moral battle that continues to rage in her head, and made her decision. In Greaves’ essay “The Kool-Aid Principle,” she spoke with her two children, Caleb and Aspen. The story focused on where she drew her line on ethics during a tiring visit to Wal-Mart. “We had finished a very long day of shopping for groceries,” she wrote. “I finally got you all out to the car, which is pretty much just like herding cats. I loaded you all into your car seats and put the groceries in the trunk. There, at the bottom of the otherwise empty shopping cart was the biggest, nastiest, test of integrity that any tired mom could ever have. It was a tiny little KOOL-AID packet. A ten cent, ruby red, bomb of temptation, aimed right at my strength and fortitude.” Read what Greaves did about it here. “My Ethical Dilemma” was the title of Lewis’ essay, which recounted his thought processes after finding a pair of sunglasses. The glasses were somewhat beat up, and not an expensive brand, and Lewis found himself thinking about keeping them. “Almost instinctively, humans know that it is immoral to take other people’s stuff,” he wrote. “Why had I even considered keeping them, even for a moment? I think that our human nature pushes us constantly and selfishly to seek gain. However we have to temper that nature with our morality.” To find out what Lewis decided, read his essay. Judge Cohen told the essay winners that he and Loren had no doubt that they will be exceptional representatives of the law school whose integrity will go a long way toward reducing, if not eliminating, lawyer jokes. “You moved us tremendously,” he said. “We have no idea where you stand in your class or where you are academically, but we know you will be successful professionals and bring honor to your work if you maintain what you evidenced in your writing.”
Meghan McCauley’s essayAlison Atwater’s essayAmy M. Coughenour’s essayNatalie Greaves’ essayDaniel A. Lewis’ essay
2008-2009 ASU NALSA Leadership
Sarah Cedarface places in Tang Writing Competition
Sarah Cedarface placed 2nd in the statewide Judge Thomas Tang Writing Competition. Her essay “Social Change and the Presidency” analogized the US policy changes on the Pine Ridge Reservation with the national/societal improvement needed for a minority to win the US presidency. It was the top finisher from ASU. Congratulations Sarah!
Needed: Moot Court Judges
NNALSA needs volunteers to serve as oral argument judges for the NNALSA Moot Court competition being held at ASU Law School on Feb. 21-23. NNALSA is in dire need of judges on Thursday and Friday, but judges are also still needed for Saturday. The competition rounds are listed below. Please sign up for as many rounds as possible. Send your responses to Matt Campbell at mcampbe4@asu.edu. Please forward this request to your coworkers and other attorneys.
16th Annual NNALSA Moot Court Competition Schedule
Thursday:
Registration — 10am-12pm
Orientation — 12:30- 1:30
Round One, Heat One – 2pm-3:30pm
Round One, Heat Two – 3:30pm-5pm
Feast N’ Fest – Night time (Maybe 6 or 7is)
Friday:
Round 2, Heat One – 8am-9:30am
Round 2, Heat Two – 9:30am-11am
Round 3, Heat One – 2pm-3:30pm
Round 3, Heat Two – 3:30pm-5pm
Heard Museum Banquets — 8pm-10pm (Bus Holding 55 leaves Hotel at 7:15pm)
Saturday:
Sweet 16 — 8am-9:30am
Elite 8 — 10am — 11:30am
Final Four — 1pm-2:30pm
Final Argument — 3:30pm-5:30pm
Awards Banquet — 7pm-9pm
NALSA Moot Court Article in Indian Country Today
Arizona Indian law students host 2008 Moot Court Competition
Posted: January 30, 2008
by: Patti Jo King
TEMPE, Ariz. – The National Native American Law Students Association chapters at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law are sponsoring the 16th annual NNALSA Moot Court Competition in Tempe Feb. 21 – 23. The competition gives NNALSA members an opportunity to enhance their student legal expertise. ”Moot” is an Anglo-Saxon term that means ”meeting.” During a town meeting, or moot, matters concerning the town were often debated. Consequently, the word ”moot” came to refer to an arguable or debatable point. Today, moot courts are frequently held to help law students in the practice of presenting oral arguments and written briefs. In a moot court, students argue the intricacies of a point of law of current interest, submitting legal briefs and constructing oral arguments. Practicing attorneys trained in Indian law encounter a wide variety of issues and problems on a daily basis, from domestic matters to business transactions and complex jurisdictional questions. Considering problems that are currently being debated in tribal law today is part of the moot exercise. The problem for the upcoming moot court competition was proposed by then-ASU law and American Indian studies professor Kevin Gover, member of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and current director of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The debate deals with a dispute between a tribe and an incorporated municipality that both seek to apply zoning laws to a parcel of free land located within a reservation. Students may enter the competition as individuals or in teams; however, participation is limited to law schools with active NNALSA chapters. Students will compete in six elimination rounds during which they will argue for the appellant petitioner. At the conclusion of each level of rounds, cumulative scores with be assessed. Winners will be selected according to the scores they receive on their participation. Judges will assign scores reflecting the student or teams’ preparation and familiarity with the facts of the case under consideration; the structure of legal arguments and knowledge of pertinent laws; their organization, presentation and speaking ability; and their persuasiveness and courtroom etiquette. Awards will be presented for Best Brief, Best Individual Oralist and Best Advocate. The Native law programs at ASU and UA have been hailed as top programs in the field. The ASU Indian Legal program was established in 1988 to train Indian law students and promote an understanding of the differences between the legal systems of Indian nations and the United States. The Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at UA is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading academic centers of learning for the study of indigenous laws and human rights. Both programs seek to prepare student lawyers who are looking for a satisfying career in public service for tribal governments to meet unique Native legal challenges. NNALSA was established in 1970 to support Native students in law school and promote the study of federal Indian law, tribal law and traditional forms of governance. It strives to reach out to American Indian communities, encourage Native people to pursue legal education and educate the legal community about American Indian legal issues. The annual moot court competition is just one of many services the organization provides for its members. Matt Campbell, vice president of ASU’s NNALSA chapter, is the organizer of this year’s competition. He said the moot competition is an important annual event for Indian law students. ”This event will enhance substantive knowledge in the fields of federal Indian law, tribal law and traditional forms of governance, and will bring together students, judges, attorneys and scholars from across the country. It is a wonderful opportunity for Native students to compete, network and share ideas about the dynamic field of Indian law.” According to tribal law scholars Frank Pommersheim and John P. LaVelle, who have written extensively about American Indian law, the competence and maturity of tribal courts have improved considerably in the past 25 years. The critical need for Indian law experts has increased, especially in light of new economic development in Indian country and other legal complexities Native people face today. Accordingly, the number of students entering the challenging field of tribal law has increased as well. Moot court competitions are one way of enhancing student legal expertise. The particulars of the moot problem can be viewed on the NNALSA Web site at www.nationalnalsa.org. For further information about competition registration and application deadlines, e-mail Campbell at mcampbe4@asu.edu.
Bartley Harris – Scholarship Winner
Congratulations to Bart Harris! Bart was selected to receive the 2nd Annual William C. Canby Scholarship award. The scholarship is for students in their final year of school with a strong interest in Indian law.
Bartley Harris is Saulteaux-Cree raised in Alberta, Canada. He is finishing his final year of the JD/MBA program here at ASU. Bartley is also near completion of the Indian Legal Program Certificate. While at school, Bartley has benefited from the support of his wife Penny and their four children, all members of Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation of Saskatchewan.