Sarah Walsh '23
Staff Editor
Pictured: A Libel Sketch about a Public Interest Student at dinner with their family.
Photo Credit: Peter Lee Hamilton '24.
UVA Law, meet your newest representative in the University’s upcoming Honor Convention: The Libel Show. That’s right, the Law School’s one and only delegate for the convention—where students will attempt to draft the University’s new Honor System—isn’t being sent by the Student Bar Association (SBA). Instead, the delegate is being sent by the organization that had most of the Law School paying money to see a man in a cropped referee’s jersey, booty shorts, and Crocs do cartwheels on the same stage that former Supreme Court justices have spoken from.[1]
For those who are unfamiliar with the current state of the University’s Honor System, here is a brief overview: For the past 180 years, students found guilty of committing an Honor offense—defined as a significant act, committed with knowledge, of lying, cheating, or stealing—were to be expelled from the University. However, this past spring, students voted to reduce the sanction imposed for Honor violations down to what amounts to a two-semester suspension. While the vote marked the largest change in the Honor System’s history, many Honor Committee members want to take these changes further and have expressed support for the implementation of a multi-sanction system.[2]
To gather input on what additional changes students want to see reflected in the Honor System, the chair of the Honor Committee—fourth-year College student Gabrielle Bray—announced in September that the Committee would be hosting a constitutional convention.[3] CIOs would be able to send delegates to the convention, which at the time was scheduled to take place in early October. After consulting with SBA President Juhi Desai ’23, 2L Senator James Hornsby ’24—who helped construct his undergraduate university’s honor system—sent Bray an email and submitted his name as the Law School’s SBA delegate. A little over a week later, Bray rejected the submission request on the grounds that, as a Special Status Organization (SSO) rather than a Contracted Independent Organization (CIO),[4] SBA did not have the proper classification to send a delegate.
Enter Libel. Clearly, a comedy show is the logical next step when considering what organization should represent the Law School once SBA is no longer a possibility, and in addition to being a 2L Senator, Hornsby is also an Assistant Director for the Libel Show. So, when he was rejected as an SBA delegate, Hornsby asked one of the show’s Directors (me) if Libel—which has CIO classification—would be willing to send him instead. Finding the absurdity of the situation incredibly funny, and fascinated to see where the hell this was going, I said yes.
Things didn’t get any less absurd once I got involved. Bray responded to Hornsby’s request to be sent as Libel’s delegate by saying that she wanted to chat with me, even though I was only CC’d on Hornsby’s email to her in case she had any objections to Libel sending a delegate. While I was thoroughly confused regarding what she would want to discuss with me, rather than with Hornsby (my questions asking about this did not receive a response), I agreed to a phone call with Bray that upcoming Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.
Wednesday rolled around, 12:30 p.m. came and went, and I received no phone call. At 12:40 p.m., Hornsby and I got an email from Bray asking if we could delay the call to Sunday, since she had the LSAT on Saturday and needed to study.[5] I was busy all day that Sunday, so I asked if she would be free sometime during the upcoming week instead. Rather than answer that question, Bray responded to Hornsby’s follow-up email the next day by stating that she wanted to speak with both of us, prompting a reply of “Great! When.” from yours truly. This message also did not receive a response. After about nine more emails trying to figure out when and how this talk was going to happen (one of which involved Hornsby stating that he would be “down to FaceTime, if we must”), we finally settled on a time and date for us to all hop on a Zoom call together.
During the Zoom call, which started ten minutes late and featured a lecture about the 1977 Honor Constitution, Hornsby and I learned the following information: The convention will likely feature thirty delegates, is currently planned to meet over the course of eight weeks, and has been a significant source of contention within the Honor Committee. One of the reasons for this contention has been the lack of opportunity for Committee involvement in decisions relating to the convention. According to Law School Honor Representative Daniel Elliott ’24, while members of the Committee have been able to express their opinions on the convention in an unofficial capacity, the Committee has not been able to vote on how they want the convention to operate, when they want the convention to be, or whether they even want a convention to happen in the first place. This means that Committee members have not been able to weigh in on issues related to the convention, at least not on the record, and whether their opinions will have any influence on the convention and how it will be conducted remains to be seen.
Additionally, as indicated by the email exchanges with Bray, communication has been something of an issue for those running the convention. The frustrations that Hornsby and I experienced have also been shared by many Committee members, although the students in charge of the convention have recently made commitments to improve their information-sharing and general communication with the Committee going forward. However, Committee members still have many questions that remain to be answered, such as what day the convention will start, whether alumni representatives and Honor Committee members—including the Law School’s Honor Reps—will be able to attend the convention, and whether graduate school SSOs will now be allowed to send delegates.[6]
Now, why should you care about any of this, beyond the fact that it’s kind of funny that the Law School is being represented by Libel at an Honor convention? Well, the goal of the convention is to produce an amendment to the Honor Constitution, outlining what would likely be an entirely new Honor System. So, on one level, you should care about the convention because, as a student at this University, any changes to the Honor System would affect you.
You should also care because a new Honor System is incredibly necessary. Even with the reduced sanction of two semesters’ leave of absence, students who are convicted of an Honor violation are ineligible to receive financial aid during their leave of absence and stand to lose University housing and eligibility for scholarships,[7] regardless of the severity of the offense that they committed. Data collected on the Honor System has indicated disproportionately high reporting and sanction rates for African Americans, Asian Americans, and international students (who, on top of the ramifications listed above, also face the possibility of losing their visa status if sanctioned).[8] Although a two-semester suspension is a step forward from expulsion, the fact remains that it is the only sanction available to be applied in response to a variety of offenses, in a variety of completely different contexts. As expressed by Elliott and echoed by both Hornsby and Bray, “a one-size-fits-all solution to issues of lying, cheating, and stealing has never been a fair system.” Now—through Libel, of all organizations—law students have the chance to be a part of changing that system.
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saw8rc@virginia.edu
[1] My request to make this article’s attached photo an image of one of the cartwheels was, understandably, rejected.
[2] Lexi Baker, Honor Chair Announces Constitutional Convention Aimed at Drafting a Multi-Sanction System, Cavalier Daily (Sept. 13, 2022), https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2022/09/honor-chair-announces-constitutional-convention-aimed-at-drafting-a-multi-sanction-system.
[3] The announcement can be found through the UVA Honor website (https://honor.virginia.edu/).
[4] The primary difference between the two classifications is that unlike SSOs, CIOs are student-formed organizations that, while officially recognized by the University, are not affiliated with it.
[5] A bold excuse to use on two law students.
[6] This question is being considered as a direct result of the SBA-Libel situation, so if UVA’s other grad schools get to send delegates through SSOs now, I have a message for those schools on behalf of Libel: You’re welcome. Shows of thanks will be accepted in the form of ticket purchases for the show this March.
[7] Some of the implications of a two-semester leave of absence are detailed on the Honor website’s page for Informed Retractions (https://honor.virginia.edu/informed-retraction). Filing an Informed Retraction is effectively the same as entering into a guilty plea for an Honor violation, and—now that the sanction for an Honor violation is no longer expulsion—it results in the same sanction as does a conviction under the Honor hearing process. Clint Roscoe & Christopher Benos, Honor Pursues Transformational Reform, Va. L. Wkly., Oct. 20, 2021, at 1.
[8] Riley Walsh, Geremia Di Maro & Erica Sprott, Report shows disproportionate Honor violation reports of Asian Americans, international students in recent years, Cavalier Daily (Feb. 18, 2019), https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2019/02/report-shows-disproportionate-honor-violation-reports-of-asian-americans-international-students-in-recent-years?ct=content_open&cv=cbox_latest. See also https://report.honor.virginia.edu/#1; https://transparency.honor.virginia.edu/.