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APPENDIX A
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW (BOALT HALL)
ACADEMIC HONOR CODE
The Honor Code is a tradition at Boalt Hall. Men and women who are preparing to enter the legal profession are expected to exhibit the same qualities of honesty, responsibility, and respect for the rights of others that are demanded of members of the Bar. The Honor Code governs the conduct of students during examinations and in all other academic and pre-professional activities at Boalt Hall. In addition, students are bound by the Campus Rules of Student Conduct, which govern matters such as dishonesty, forgery and sexual harassment.
Primary responsibility for respecting the appropriate rules rests with each individual student and with the student body as a whole. Students, faculty and staff are urged to bring apparent violations to the attention of the Instructor and/or the Dean. The Honor Code can be successful only to the extent that it is seen to have the overwhelming support of student and faculty opinion and to be taken seriously by everyone.
Enforcement Procedure
A student, faculty or staff member witnessing any violation or apparent violation of this Code should bring the matter to the attention of the Dean. After discussion with the alleged violator, the instructor, and other affected or knowledgeable persons, the Dean (or the Dean's designated representative) shall determine if informal resolution of the matter is appropriate. If informal resolution is inappropriate, or if the person accused of a violation does not agree to the resolution, the Dean shall refer the matter to the Campus Dean of Students for appropriate action under the disciplinary rules and procedures of the Berkeley Campus. Informal resolutions may be reported to the Campus Student Conduct Office as needed for their purposes. The Dean also has the responsibility to decide whether information pertaining to violations is relevant to Bar admissions standards and must be reported to the appropriated State Bar authorities. If this is done, the Dean shall send a copy, or notice of such report, to the student so reported.
Examinations and Other Academic Activities
The basic guide for a student taking an examination or participating in any other academic activity is a sense of honesty and integrity. Students are expected to rely on their own knowledge and ability, and not use unauthorized materials or represent the work of others as their own. These standards apply also to papers, oral presentations, work in clinical programs or other activities for which academic credit is assigned, except where the instructor provides otherwise. Examinations at Boalt Hall usually are not monitored, and "take-home" examinations are often employed. Students should be scrupulously careful not to consult materials except as permitted by the rules of the particular examination, not to obtain or receive unauthorized help, and not to continue writing after time has been called. Students who are allowed to take an examination either before or after the normal date should not give or obtain any information about the content of the examination. Because examinations at Boalt Hall are generally graded on the curve system, violations of the letter or the spirit of the rules are violations of the rights of other students, as well as of the standards of integrity required by this school and the legal profession.
Instructors also have an obligation to minimize the likelihood that cheating will occur or that some students will obtain an unfair advantage over others. In particular, instructors should be careful to avoid using old examination questions or questions in use at a neighboring institution if under the circumstances this is likely to provide an opportunity for some students to obtain an unfair advantage. Instructors are also encouraged to cooperate with staff to see that examinations are fairly and efficiently administered.
Library
Because of the Library's central importance in furthering research and study, and because of the heavy use of library materials by law students and others, it is important that the posted rules of the library be strictly observed; violation of library rules is a violation of the Academic Honor Code. In particular, mutilation or theft of library material is absolutely forbidden. (It also is a criminal offense.) Any violation should be reported promptly to the Dean for appropriate action in consultation with the Librarian. All Law Library users, including students, should cooperate to see that materials are returned promptly as required under the rules and that they are reshelved or made available for reshelving promptly after use.
Career Services Office and Placement Activities
Policies of the Law School Career Services Office should scrupulously be observed. Students are expected to observe the basic standards of honesty, integrity, responsibility and respect for the rights of others when using the Law School Career Services Office and in other placement activities. For example, any falsification or misrepresentation of Law School grades or other records, recommendations or other qualifications is a violation of the Academic Honor Code. Similarly, no student may take any improper action to gain an unfair advantage or place any other student at an unfair disadvantage in the career planning or placement activities of the School, whether strictly within the Career Services Office or more generally.
APPENDIX B
WRITING REQUIREMENT
(1) Writing Requirement Scope and Standards. A paper undertaken for Writing Requirement credit typically ought to have as its ambition or model a good quality "student comment" of the sort that appear in major law journals. To be sure, it is not anticipated that in the end all, or even most, of the papers completed for Writing Requirement credit will be published. Moreover, it is fair to say that some students will have papers approved that are not as ambitious in their undertaking as is a typical, good student comment. Nonetheless, the journal comment illustrates a kind of project with which the faculty is familiar and that typifies the sorts of things that ought to be represented in papers done for the Writing Requirement.
The paper usually has a topic of considerable scope; it is usually quite a bit more than a critical review of a recent case or the criticism of a narrow area of doctrine. (Notwithstanding the reference to student "comments," a student casenote can satisfy the writing requirement if it meets the substantive standards outlined herein.) It typically involves a considerable research effort, frequently taking the student into non-legal materials. It requires imaginative analysis and typically involves the attempt to address questions not already resolved in the literature or in the courts. Finally, such a writing is typically of substantial length, even if all the quotations, background description, and past legal development were to be excised from the paper.
The central goal is that the student achieve substantial intellectual growth through the project. This usually will occur if the student has learned to find, evaluate, and synthesize a wide range of materials applicable to a broad topic of his or her formulation, and if the student has learned to present his or her analysis of the problem in a thoughtful and effective manner.
Papers should usually be in the 40 to 70 page range. Some will be longer; rarely will a paper be approved which contains less than 30 pages of serious writing. To be sure, a brilliant paper can be short; so long as the analysis is lucid and a significant research effort went into producing the conclusions, length matters less. By the same token, an unnecessarily wordy, quote-filled, loosely argued and superficial paper can drag on, undesirably, for 100 pages or so; here length is a detriment. Many instructors will require a student to revise or rewrite the first version of a paper submitted for Writing Requirement credit.
Not all those students who set out to fulfill the Writing Requirement actually succeed in satisfying the requirement with that effort. Sometimes, of course, the student will simply fail to complete the project and will either receive No Credit or will drop the class. Other times, however, a paper will suffice for purposes of obtaining the units for which the student has registered but will not be approved as satisfying the Writing Requirement. For example, some instructors insist upon a paper of honors quality.
In the end, it is up to each individual instructor to decide what will suffice and to try to guide the student in a personal way toward the successful completion of the paper.
(2) Satisfying the Writing Requirement. Many Boalt students satisfy the Writing Requirement through a two unit independent research and writing project taken under Law 299. However, the work necessary to obtain two units of Law 299 credit may not suffice for the Writing Requirement, and a student project undertaken for only one unit of Law 299 is almost always insufficiently ambitious to satisfy the Writing Requirement. Both the Writing Requirement and Law 299 require the active supervision of a member of the faculty.
A second popular way to satisfy the Writing Requirement is through a seminar paper. In some seminars, the instructor insists that all participating students take on projects which are ambitious enough to satisfy the Writing Requirement. In other seminars, pursuit of the Writing Requirement is optional and has to be arranged by agreement with the instructor. Traditionally, students who make such arrangements obtain no extra units of credit; however, it is possible, if the instructor thinks it appropriate and desirable, to seek one, or perhaps even two, units of Law 299 on top of the seminar credit for student work when the circumstances so warrant.
Some students prepare a paper for a course and have that paper certified as satisfying the Writing Requirement. For this purpose the Dean's Office has, in effect, treated all classes as seminars. Plainly, not all papers written for courses will satisfy the Writing Requirement. Because Writing Requirement papers done in courses are usually written in lieu of an exam, no additional units are awarded to those satisfying the Writing Requirement in this way.
Faculty should encourage students to consider publication of their papers. The writing programs sponsored by the law journals at Boalt offer opportunities for students to satisfy the Writing Requirement, if the standards of these Guidelines are met.
Finally, so long as a faculty member is satisfied that his or her supervision and achievement standards have been met, it is possible in some cases to obtain Writing Requirement credit for a paper not done for any units. While in such a case the student almost surely could have obtained two units of Law 299 for the work, on occasion for one reason or another, he or she does not sign up for the credit. Law journal pieces sometimes fall into this category.
(3) Certification of Credit. Any member of the instructional staff holding the title professor, acting professor, visiting professor, emeritus professor, or with the prior concurrence of the Dean's Office, lecturer or visiting lecturer, is permitted to award Writing Requirement credit. Past practice has shown that full-time Boalt professors, emeritus professors, and full-time, visiting professors are the main providers of Law 299 supervision and therefore certify virtually all of the Writing Requirement projects. They also certify projects of the work done through seminars and courses. However, visiting lecturers, lecturers and visiting professors who are at Boalt teaching a single course are permitted to and regularly do certify completion of the Writing Requirement for a number of students in the context of papers undertaken under their supervision in the seminar (or course) they are teaching at Boalt.
(4) Multiple Papers. Although this is not the usual practice and it is generally not preferred, a student may nonetheless satisfy the Writing Requirement with a series of related papers prepared for a course or seminar. In individual cases instructors have the authority to approve such writings when, in the aggregate, they seem to the instructor to satisfy the purposes of the Writing Requirement.
(5) Informal Procedures. Many instructors insist that students settle on a topic early in the term and promptly bring in for approval an outline of both the questions to be studied and the intended research strategy. Many instructors require regular reports of progress, including an early draft of at least a substantial portion of the paper so that a preliminary critique of writing style and substantive analysis can be provided to the student. Others want to see the completed paper, but may insist on the rewriting of portions before signing off on the project.
(6) Formal Procedures. When a student decides to undertake a project intended to satisfy the Writing Requirement through a Law 299 project, he or she should have the supervising faculty member sign a petition to that effect. That information should be filed with the Registrar's Office, either as part of the student's registration or, if necessary, as a late filing. While agreement about and filing of the Writing Requirement undertaking is preferred at the outset of the term and at the outset of a project, it is permissible, with the instructor's approval, to file the undertaking agreement at any time. When a student finishes the writing requirement, either through a 299 project or a seminar or course, he or she should have the supervising faculty member sign off on a Writing Requirement form and file the form with the Registrar's Office.
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