Feature Story: JCUL
Facing Risk on College Campuses
Student suicide and violent campus attacks are sensitive issues for universities around the country. They are also a reality that attorneys and administrators must face without flinching—either in efforts to prevent tragedy or to deal with the fallout after an incident.
Two recent issues of the Journal of College and University Law (JCUL), published at Notre Dame Law School, examine the complex legal questions surrounding the problem. What does the law say about a university’s responsibility to prevent student suicide and assess threats from troubling students? How can administrators improve campus safety while respecting students’ privacy? Given the potential for violent acts on campuses, what can colleges do to avert such attacks and minimize their institutional liability?
Such questions existed before the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech University, but they have gained urgency since then. According to John Robinson, executive associate dean of the Law School and faculty editor of the Journal, “It is impossible to guarantee that there will never be another mass disaster of the sort that occurred at Virginia Tech. In the environments that are essential to college and university life, both homicide and suicide will be perennial risks.” Because of that fact, Robinson adds, “institutions ought to be identifying in their own particular environment—whether a rural university or urban commuter college—the things they can do to identify the students who are at risk and to address the problems that put them at risk.”
About 3,800 attorneys who represent higher education institutions read the Journal of College and University Law, so Robinson hopes that its recent articles will have a broad impact. An official publication of the National Association of College and University Attorneys, JCUL is one of four legal journals produced at Notre Dame Law School. Faculty editors and a student editor-in-chief work together to get the Journal out three times a year, with a staff of 25 law students who process the submissions of outside authors and contribute their own writing, too.
“As part of a student’s law school education, having the opportunity to work on a law journal is a very, very good thing,” says Robinson. What’s more, “JCUL is in just about every general counsel’s office at every college and university in the country. It’s a great opportunity for Notre Dame to have an impact on the way in which the law governing colleges and universities is understood and practiced in America today.”
