South Texas College of Law Annotations (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 23, No. 5, Ed. 1, February, 1995 Page: 3 of 12
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February 1995
Enrollment
goal is met
with slight
student dip
By WILLIAM L. WILKS
The new semester has be-
gun. Graduation went smoothly.
Alumna JanisJack,judgeoftheU.S.
District Court in Corpus Christi, de-
livered the commencement address,
which was personal and marvelously
brief. We will miss the 145 seniors
who graduated, but welcome the 105
new students who replaced them.
This 40-student drop brings
us down to a student population of
1,250, which has been our goal for
some time. This school had a student
population of more than 1,400 just
three years ago and the faculty be-
lieves that 1,250 is closer to an opti-
mum number for this fine school.
David Cowan is now aboard
as the new director of our law library.
Don't hesitate to drop in and see what
a reformed Baylor librarian looks like.
He would be glad to chat with you
about your concerns and about his
plans for the coming years.
The dean has gained perhaps
20 pounds over the past several
months for a good cause. Various
directors, Dan Wise, other Institu-
tional Advancement staff members
and I have been lunching all over the
place, smiling at people, scratching
to climb closer to our $25 million goal
for the new library. Trips to Florida
and Beaumont have been promising
(at least we have lots of promises)
and we are on the agenda of half a
dozen foundations, which will meet
in February and March. I hope in my
next letter to be able to report some
real movement upward toward our
goal.
This year, we are not plan-
ning a phonathon to raise money for
our annual fund but, instead, will
convert it to a thank-you-thon, simply
to thank the donors of the past for
what they have done. Too often, we
spend too much time asking for some-
thing and too little time in expressing
appreciation.
In that regard, I thank the
students who have been particularly
kind to write letters of thank you and
of compliment to various staff mem-
bers from the financial aid office to
the academic support program. CBS
is said to count one letter of apprecia-
tion for a program to equal 10 letters
of complaint; we are too often quick
to complain and slow to praise.
A digression: In a recent drive
over to Beaumont and back with
Wayne Fisher, of Fisher, Gallagher
continued in next column
Page 3
Student honor court a priority
By WILL BURDINE
SBA President
I'd like to take this time to welcome everyone back! I hope that your holiday was a safe and peaceful
one and that you haven't forgotten everything you've learned. I know that everyone must be as excited as I am
that the break is finally over and studies can resume. But seriously, the SBA has a lot of great events planned
to make this semester one of the best. Just ask anyone who attended the After Finals Bash at Woodrows!
Although the SBA has several events and parties planned for this semester, the focus of my
administration will be to implement the Student Honor Court that I discussed last semester. A student honor
system is imperative to creating the professional and prestigious atmosphere of a top-quality institution. Like
all professions that are self-governing, law students are in the best position to know and understand what fellow
students are experiencing. I firmly believe that students should be in charge of governing themselves (with an
appeal process to the administration). We will have copies of the proposed system in the library for everyone
to read. There will be pages attached that will provide room for your comments. Please take the time to write
down your thoughts so that we can devise a system that represents everyone.
The floods during the end of last semester affected many of the students here at South Texas. In order
to help out, the SBA organized a food drive, which was extremely successful. Hats off to LeeAnne Richardson,
who ran the campaign that supplied a record amount of canned goods to the Houston Food Bank.
I hope you will get involved this semester and seek our assistance if you need anything — especially you
first-year students. As for the future, the Spring Banquet Bash will be Saturday, April 1,1995, so mark your
calendar now!
Good luck this semester.
In response
Reader finds fault with story on life and death issues
(Editor's note: What follows was
submitted in response to a student
editorial which ran in the Novem-
ber Annotations.)
By GREGORY A. WILSON
It is exactly one week before
my first final of my first semester.
Yet, when I read the article on the
ethical dilemma of life and death
written by Tom Browder in the No-
vember 1994 edition of Annotations,
my outrage forced me to respond.
Mr. Browder based the en-
tire premise of his article on an insup-
portable premise and faulty logic.
His contention, that in order to be
intellectually honest, one must group
the life and death issues he has iden-
tified (suicide, euthanasia, abortion,
capital punishment and war), is laugh-
able. According to him, if you are
against abortion, then logic forces
you to be against all the other issues
Dean
continued from previous column
& Lewis and of our board of direc-
tors, he recommended that we teach
in law school something about the
quality of life that a lawyer should
seek. He indicated that in his shop,
he doesn't praise the workaholics
who are there at all hours. As glorious
as our profession might be, it is not
worth giving up family, friends, mu-
sic, recreation and the good life, no
matter how simple, in search of the
dollar. Where that belongs in the
curriculum, I am not sure, but his
words are wise. Lawyers are renais-
sance persons to begin with and
should not lose their interests in mat-
ters outside the law and become nar-
row and one-dimensional when they
hang that diploma on the wall.
With that, I climb down from
the soap box.
in his group. Additionally, if you be-
lieve in one issue, you must believe
in them all. How he comes to this
enlightened conclusion is a mystery.
What Mr. Browder fails to
recognize is that the issues he listed
are mutually exclusive. The fact that
each one deals in life or death is not
the exclusive motivating factor in
evaluating a person's conviction to-
ward an issue. Each of those issues
contains an underlying moral motiva-
tion behind the choice between life
and death.
For example, a widely held
criticism of the pro-life movement is
that the majority of the members are
for capital punishment. For those
people, there is no inconsistency.
The surface inconsistency can be dis-
pelled with the application of Mr.
Browder's much-beloved logic.
To distinguish, you must
clarify your belief in the right to life,
or right to death, whichever may
apply. If you do not believe in an
absolute right to life, but in an indi-
vidual right to life instead, the incon-
sistency vanishes. Individual right to
life is determined with the under-
standing that every human is born
with the privilege of living as one of
his inalienable rights, as defined in
the Declaration of Independence.
However, with that right, as with any
right, comes a responsibility. The re-
sponsibility of every living human is
to live and abide by the rules society
has created for us. If a person chooses
to breach that responsibility by vio-
lating certain laws of the society, she
has surrendered his right to life and
given society the option of terminat-
ing that right, much like society ter-
minated the inalienable right to free-
dom by incarcerating criminals. Cer-
tainly the inalienable rights apply to
every human, however, it is within
the confines of that individual
human's choices as to whether she
surrenders those rights.
This theory can be applied to
all of the issues above, with different
results, without being inconsistent.
For example, abortion deals with the
termination of a life (or a potential
life). If you believe life begins at
conception, one's inalienable rights
are bestowed immediately. The baby
has the same individual right to life as
the already born. With that in mind, it
is not the individual baby's choice as
to her life or death, but the interven-
tion of forces apart from the baby's
rights that are making the choice of
life or death for her.
I will not take the time to
apply the theory to every issue raised
earlier. As you can see, it is entirely
possible to consider each of those
life and death issues individually,
without being intellectually dishon-
est. Many other factors also are at
issue, such as loyalty and duty to
country in the case of war, or the
intervention of medical treatment in
the case of euthanasia. I will also
avoid dealing with Mr. Browder's
ridiculous ramblings concerning the
existence of God, for lack of time
and space. However, I will say that,
along with the rest of his article, his
logic in this area is just as flawed.
The ethics of death and life
are all important and complex issues
that we as a society are mandated to
acknowledge and deal with from now
on. However, it is essential that a
tremendous amount of thought and
reason go into our opinions on these
issues. Baseless and thoughtless
rhetoric, such as Mr. Browder's, do
nothing to further people's enlight-
enment of the subject, but only con-
tinue to fuel an inferno of ignorance.
Deadline for next issue:
Feb. 10,1995
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Piller, Ruth. South Texas College of Law Annotations (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 23, No. 5, Ed. 1, February, 1995, newspaper, February 1995; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth144504/m1/3/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting South Texas College of Law.