GUEST COLUMN: 'Laws without dollars are in vain'

From Jordana Horn's, Guest Columnist From Jordana Horn's, Guest Columnist Walk onto the Law School's campus on any weekday, and you will find a courtyard full of students. One wall of this courtyard faces the library, and across that wall, the University's motto unfurls in a granite banner: Leges sine moribus vanae. The translation on the wall reads, Without just ways, laws are hollow. My less-poetic translation: Laws without morals are in vain. Anyone stopping into the Law School today -- specifically, room T-145 at 1 p.m. -- can learn that the motto's real translation reads Laws without dollars are in vain. Today, a representative from the United States Judge Advocate General Corps of the military will come to the Law School to recruit students. The Law School's Career Planning and Placement On-Campus Recruiting has a built-in anti-discrimination policy prohibiting discriminatory organizations from utilizing OCR. As current military policy explicitly discriminates against homosexuals, the military should not be allowed to recruit on campus. However, the Solomon Amendment is a federal law threatening loss of work-study financial aid and Perkins Loans if the military is denied access to on-campus recruiting at American law schools. The law has the ironic effect of pitting equal opportunity advocates against students in need of funding, and the horrible result of the Law School putting its anti-discrimination policy up for sale. The decision to allow the JAG on campus is a decision that was not made easily, and the Law School's policy is only suspended for this year. Due to the recent legitimization of the Solomon Amendment's extortionate tactics by the U.S. Department of Education, the Law School had little time to mobilize resistance. No other law school has refrained from caving in to the pressure. Unlike at other law schools, at Penn, input from students, faculty and staff was actively solicited as the entire decision-making process was conducted out in the open. And the Law School Dean Colin Diver, as well as the Career Planning and Placement Committee, advocated utilizing this next year to find ways to avoid compromising the Law School's policy in the future. But today, when the JAG Corps comes to recruit on campus, the anti-discrimination policy is suspended, i.e. non-existent. As a straight law student, this whole episode has proven much more educational than any experience I have had in a Law School classroom. I asked one student what he thought about the situation. He looked at me uncomprehendingly, answering that it didn't effect him at all: "Well, I'm not gay." Coverage in The Daily Pennsylvanian has similarly focused on the gay community's reaction to the Law School's decision. This is not a gay issue. This is an issue of the right of an academic institution to make its own decisions and policies, without having to choose between its moral stance and its neediest students. This is an issue of what nondiscrimination means, and an issue of to what length we are willing to go, as individuals and as an institution, to protect it and our commitment to it. The Law School's anti-discrimination policy is more than a policy -- it resonates with the belief that laws without morals are in vain. Stating that the University of Pennsylvania Law School is committed to a policy against discrimination in employment based on race, color, sex, sexual or affectional orientation, religion, age, national origin or disability. The Law School's career planning and placement services are available only to employers whose standards and practices conform to this policy is stating the belief of Penn Law as an institution. I want to protect this policy. I don't want to discriminate for dollars. But that has to transcend dramatic rhetoric. Over the next year, the Law School must assemble its own defense forces. The school cannot and must not disenfranchise students in need of financial aid. Currently, the American Council on Education is pursuing litigation to deflate the Solomon Amendments infringement on academic freedom. Penn Law should join these endeavors and work to persuade other law schools in the American Association of Law Schools to take a similar stance to protect anti-discrimination policies. This summer, many of my peers and I will go to large law firms, earning tremendous salaries that can go up to $1,600 a week. I propose that each one of us who are able and willing make a financial commitment to protecting and keeping the anti-discrimination policy. Let's earmark one week of our summer salaries to go to a fund at the Law School to provide financial aid to those students whose aid would be revoked if we stand by our principles. Let's try to convince the faculty and staff to make a similar commitment. Let's try to convince donors to match our own donations. I hope that the military recruiters read this column today. Know this: we don't want you here. It's nothing personal -- just that we want to believe in what we believe: equal opportunity and anti-discrimination. Law school, from its classes to its granite engravings, teaches us to say things as eloquently as we can. Now, it is time to teach ourselves how to say things and mean them.