At first glance, it seems as though the Pre-Law Society at Tufts is a popular organization. The Pre-Law Society e-list has over 200 students on it, according to Co-President Tony Carucci.
But only about 50 to 60 of those members are active. Many students considering law school aren't even a part of the Pre-Law Society.
Carucci, a sophomore, believes that Tufts is in need of a new forum for such students to conglomerate. In creating Common Law, a new campus publication scheduled to debut in October 2009, he hopes to achieve this goal.
"As co-presidents of the Pre-Law Society, [sophomore Cat Kim and I] wanted more and more ways to be a resource to the pre-law community at Tufts," Carucci said. "In our experience, we've found the Pre-Law Society is only going to be as good as people let it be because it requires the interest and the participation of its members. So we think this journal is the perfect way to have a permanently running student organization dedicated to people interested in going to law school. They can be working conceivably every week on something that is law-related."
The idea for the journal was born in early February, but it was still unnamed.
"We asked people who were coming to our meetings to come up with [a name]," Carucci said. "We were in the middle of the meeting going over some names, and no one liked them. All the sudden, I thought of Common Law as a pun about trying to make complex legal issues more accessible to undergraduates or people who don't know anything about the law ... I'm very proud of that moment."
Carucci cannot apply to the Tufts Community Union Senate for new group status until the fall, which is why he is hoping to receive funding from and create a strong partnership with the Tufts Lawyers Association, a group of Tufts alumni who are involved in the legal profession.
In addition to connecting with Tufts graduates, Carucci is actively trying to reach out to current students who might be law school applicants in the future.
"Our goal ... is to provide a forum for people who are interested in learning more about issues directly; to have a place to write articles and submit to our publication and also work on editing ... to increase the exposure of what a legal education can offer a Tufts undergrad after they graduate ... and hopefully to spark [an] interest [in those who have not considered law school]," Carucci said.
According to Carucci, in the United States, there are less than five undergraduate publications dedicated to legal issues. He hopes Common Law will distinguish itself even further with a completely unique form. Each edition of the journal will be composed of three parts.
"The largest [component] is going to be the articles," Carucci said. "We accept submissions that are anything law-related. So it can be domestic law, it can be international law, [or] you could talk about a Supreme Court case."
Right now, writers are tackling topics such as the legal matters concerning the invasion of Iraq and the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
In addition to conventional articles, Carucci plans on including three interviews per issue.
"We want to have an interview with an attorney practicing in a traditional law firm, an attorney who does not work at a traditional law firm but has a job working as corporate council in a company or something like that ... and the last interview is with a current law student," he said. "[We'll] most likely go through the Tufts Lawyers Association and deal with attorneys who have graduated from Tufts or students who are currently in law school who graduated from Tufts."
The final section of Common Law will feature profiles on various law schools by region.
"For the first issue, I believe we're going to be doing California law schools, so one of our writers is going to be writing on about five to six law schools in California, comparing and contrasting them and giving general information about them," Carucci said. "Hopefully, this will be a resource for people to learn about different schools in different areas."
Carucci and Kim respect Dartmouth College's law journal and looked to it as a model on which they can expand.
"We're still in the early stages of finding our own identity ... That's why we have the interviews; that's why we have the law school profiles, and in that sense, we will be the only undergrad journal in the country that does that," Carucci said. "The Dartmouth Law Journal is ... really, really good, [but it's] only academic articles, and ... I don't think that we want to exclusively be that because I don't think that we'd be serving the Tufts community as well ... We wouldn't be informing them as much as we could."
Carucci and Kim mean for their publication to ignite a discussion amongst the pre-law community. In future issues of Common Law, they will have a section for responses.
"Anybody who reads the journal and reads an article ... can submit whatever they want to us, and we'll publish it in the next issue, assuming it's well-written and intelligent," he said. "The purpose is to spark dialogue ... between people. Hopefully we could even schedule events around this in the future, like debate."
And events are not Carucci's only ambition. He wants Common Law to become a mainstay beyond the Tufts campus.
"We're hoping that [Common Law] will become distributed throughout the New England area at the most prestigious schools," he said. "We hope that we'll be able to get most research libraries in the area to subscribe to our journal -- most likely for free ... [just so they can] have a copy of it ... and we could get some sort of dedicated readership."
Carucci has never undertaken a project similar to this before, but he is working hard to make his vision a reality.
"We're definitely learning as we go, and there are a lot of obstacles that we're overcoming in the process. But, hopefully, it will work out."
