St. Mary's University School of Law will host its Eighth Annual Minority Pre-Law Student Symposium on Saturday, February 28, 2009, coordinated and sponsored by the Center for Latina/o Legal Studies.

Since 2001, St. Mary's University School of Law has successfully coordinated and hosted its Minority Pre-Law Student Symposium. The Symposium was initially funded through a generous grant from the Law School Admission Council. The Symposium involves the participation of all nine Texas law schools, the Texas Young Lawyers Association and the Upward Bound program. The Symposium is for minority high school and college students interested in pursuing a legal education. Students spend a Saturday on the St. Mary's campus learning about the law school application process, admissions, financial aid, student life and career options. Students also participate in an interactive mock law school class/exercise conducted by St. Mary's law professors. The first 100 interested students may elect to attend the pre-Sympoisum Chicano Civil Rights Banquet on Friday night. The symposium ensures opportunities for participants to interact with attorneys, judges, law school faculty, law school students, admissions officers and others. Recent attendance has been between 200-250 participants; seating is extremely limited and pre-registration is required.

Program

The Symposium begins with onsite registration and check-in from 10:30 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. The luncheon and keynote speaker for both the high school and college student participants will begin promptly at 11:30 a.m. As in past years, admissions officers from San Antonio area colleges will be invited to participate in the College Fair at the end of the high school program, and admissions officers from all nine Texas law schools will again be invited to participate in the Law Fair at the end of the college program. To view a draft of this year's program, click here for Pre-law High School Program and here for Pre-law College Program.

Other planned activites for the day are explained below.

Keynote Luncheon

The symposium kicks off with a noon luncheon for all participants. The keynote address is delivered by a prominent and successful minority attorney licensed in the State of Texas. Sylvia A. Cardona, President of the Texas Young Lawyers Association and an attorney at Langley & Banack, Inc., will be this year's keynote speaker.

Past keynote addresses have been delivered by the following:

• Bill Jones, General Counsel to Texas Governor Rick Perry
• Jose Roberto Juarez, Dean of the University of Denver School of Law, and only one of three Hispanic law school deans in the country
• Mr. Gary Bledsoe, President and General Counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of Texas
• Councilman Art Hall, San Antonio City Council, first African American elected to the San Antonio City Council from District 8
• Mr. Eduardo Rodriguez, then-President of the State Bar of Texas, and only the second Hispanic to serve in that position
• Ms. Nina Perales, Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund's San Antonio office, and one of the very few Latinas ever to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court
• Charles E. Cantú, Dean of the St. Mary's University School of Law, and the most senior Hispanic law professor in the country.

Law Fair and College Fair

Each year, admissions representatives from the following colleges and universities in the San Antonio area are invited to attend the College Fair:

• St. Mary's University
• San Antonio Community College
• Palo Alto College
• Our Lady of the Lake University
• St. Phillip's College
• Trinity University
• University of the Incarnate Word
• University of Texas at San Antonio

Admissions representatives from the nine Texas law schools are invited to attend the Law Fair:

• St. Mary's University School of Law
• Baylor Law School
• South Texas College of Law
• Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law
• Texas Tech University School of Law
• Texas Wesleyan University School of Law
• Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law
• University of Houston Law Center
• University of Texas School of Law

Kaplan and Princeton Review Raffles

Kaplan has donated scholarships to cover the cost of Kaplan LSAT preparation courses. We are currently working to obtain similar scholarships from Princeton Review. Attendees will be selected at random to receive these scholarships.

Chicano Civil Rights Banquet

In 2006, the Symposium added a banquet that is part of the Chicano Civil Rights Series at St. Mary's University. The Chicano Civil Rights Series is spearhead by the Center for Latina/o Legal Studies to celebrate historic legal cases which furthered the civil rights of Chicanos and Chicanas in the United States.

The first banquet celebration commemorated the Mendez v. Westminster case out of California - the Latino communities' equivalent of Brown v. Board - and the keynote address was delivered by Ms. Sylvia Mendez, one of the plaintiff children in the Mendez case. In 2007, the banquet commemorated the landmark San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, addressing the Texas system for funding public schools. In 2008, as explained more fully below, the banquet focused on the landmark White v. Regester case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Hispanics were an identifiable class of citizens affected by unconstitutional redistricting procedures.

Our next banquet will take place on Friday, February 27, 2009, the day before the actual Symposium. The President's Reception will be from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., sponsored by the Office of the President of St. Mary's University, with a sit-down dinner to follow. This year's theme is to be announced.

Of the 200 seats available at the banquet, 100 are set aside for the first 100 student registrants from the Minority Pre-Law Student Symposium who indicate that they would also like to attend the dinner. The other 100 seats are filled with academics, community and civil leaders, as well as elected officials, who mingle and network with the promising high school and college Symposium attendees. In past years, the breadth and depth of the community leaders has been quite impressive, including current members of the San Antonio City Council, members of the Texas House, various educators from throughout San Antonio's high schools, colleges and universities, and many members of the San Antonio civil right's struggles of the past. In short, the Chicano Civil Rights Banquet has been a quite successful and exciting part of the program.

If you are interested in attending the Chicano Civil Rights Banquet, be sure to indicate your desire when you register online.

2009 Case - Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)
2008 Commemorated the case of White v. Regester

The preeminent case regarding the voting rights of Mexican Americans, and indeed all racial minorities, is the United States Supreme Court ruling in White v. Regester in 1973. White was concerned with the reapportionment and redistricting following the 1970 U.S. Census, and actually consisted of four consolidated cases. In one of the four cases, the plaintiff challenged the multi-member state house districts in Béxar County, and also alleged that the senatorial districts in Béxar County were "politically and racially gerrymandered." The trial court concluded "there can be no doubt that lack of political participation by Texas Chicanos is affected by a cultural incompatibility which has been fostered by a deficient educational system." The history of discrimination and disparate treatment of Chicanos caused the court in White to strike down the use of multi-member districts and impose a legal remedy known as single-member districts in Béxar County. This case opened the door for Mexican Americans and others to challenge successfully redistricting processes which denied these groups the opportunity of achieving meaningful results with respect to voting. In finding for the plaintiffs in the case, the United States Supreme Court declared:

[T]he District Court considered the Mexican-Americans in Béxar County to be an identifiable class for Fourteenth Amendment purposes and proceeded to inquire whether the impact of the multimember district on this group constituted invidious discrimination. Surveying the historic and present condition of the Béxar County Mexican-American community, which is concentrated for the most part on the west side of the city of San Antonio, the court observed, based upon prior cases and the record before it, that the Béxar County community, along with other Mexican-Americans in Texas, had long "suffered from, and continues to suffer from, the results and effects of invidious discrimination and treatment in the fields of education, employment, economics, health, politics and others."

Based on the totality of the circumstances, the District Court evolved its ultimate assessment of the multi-member district, overlaid, as it was, on the cultural and economic realities of the Mexican-American community in Béxar County and its relationship with the rest of the county. Its judgment was that Béxar County Mexican-Americans 'are effectively removed from the political processes of Béxar [County], . . . whatever their absolute numbers may total in that County.' Single-member districts were thought required to remedy 'the effects of past and present discrimination against Mexican-Americans' and to bring the community into the full stream of political life of the county and State by encouraging their further registration, voting, and other political activities.

On the record before us, we are not inclined to overturn these findings.

--United States Supreme Court in White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973)

Registration

Minority Law Students Associations

Representatives of the Asian Pacific Islander Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Association and the Hispanic Law Students Association staff a table for each of their respective minority law student organizations throughout the Symposium. The table contains a variety of interesting materials, and organization members are available throughout the afternoon, including the Law Fair, for Symposium participants to answer questions and address concerns about being a minority law student.

Directions

From Downtown

• Take I-10 West to Culebra Exit.
• Go West on Culebra to 36th Street.
• Turn Right. The Entrance is on your Right.
• Enter and drive past the Stadium toward Law School Buildings.
• Park in Visitor Parking.

From the Airport

• Take Loop 410 West to I-10 East.
• Take I-10 East toward Downtown.
• Take Culebra Exit and go West (Right) to 36th Street.
• Turn Right. The Entrance is on your Right.
• Enter and drive past the Stadium toward Law School Buildings.
• Park in Visitor Parking.

Once you arrive at the Law School campus, please make your way to the Law Classroom building, which is building 25 on the map of the university campus.

Contact

For additional information, please contact Alex Salazar at (210) 431-8033 or via email at alexisalazar@hotmail.com

Reynaldo Anaya Valencia
Associate Dean for Administration and Finance and Professor of Law
Director, Center for Latina/o Legal Studies
St. Mary's University School of Law
rvalencia@stmarytx.edu

Dr. Sonia Garcia
Professor of Political Science
St. Mary's University
sgarcia@stmarytx.edu

Professor Dayla Pepi
Clinical Professor of Law
St. Mary's University School of Law
dpepi@stmarytx.edu

Professor Al Kaufmann
Assistant Professor of Law
St. Mary's University School of Law
akauffman@stmarytx.edu