2024-2025 Student Handbook

For the purposes of determining honors, the January and May graduates of the same calendar year will be considered the graduating class. Honor determinations for September graduates will be based on the honor determinations made in the preceding May of the same calendar year. Students are eligible for honors only in the calendar year and division in which they actually graduate regardless of Leaves of Absence, early degree completion, change of division or any other change (unexpected or not) to their anticipated graduation date.

F. Academic Integrity

1. Any violation of academic integrity shall be viewed as a serious infraction of the Rules and Regulations of the Law School. Violations of academic integrity shall include, but are not limited to, dishonesty in the examination process and plagiarism in written work. Plagiarism is the representation of the language, ideas or format of another as one’s own in any writing submitted for academic purposes. 2. Use of the work of another without proper attribution constitutes plagiarism whether or not the writer acts with intent to mislead or deceive. However, such intent, or the lack of it, may be considered in determining the proper sanction if a violation is established. 3. It is not permissible to paraphrase more than a few words of the work of another. Any idea which is paraphrased from the work of another must be properly acknowledged. It is impermissible to use quotations from sources, even with acknowledgment, unless the material quoted is properly identified in the text (e.g. by quotation marks, in a block quote, etc.), attributed, and cited including the specific page(s) where the quoted material may be found. 4. It is also impermissible to copy substantial parts of the sentence structure, paragraph structure, or organizational format of the work of another, even if some words or ideas are changed from the original. Such borrowing is impermissible even if citations to the source are included in the text. A general citation of a source, without quotation, is not sufficient to acknowledge the borrowing of the words or intellectual structure of another’s work. Such citations indicate that the source supports the idea in the citing text, not that the words or structure of the cited work are used. Quotations must be given verbatim and indented or placed in quotation marks. 5. Other than as provided in Rule I. H. 1. f. or as allowed under Academic Concentration rules, no student may submit the same written work, or substantially the same paper, in satisfaction of more than one academic requirement. If, in unusual circumstances, a student is authorized to submit the same work, or parts of the same work, in satisfaction of more than one requirement, written consent of all persons to whom the work is to be submitted must be obtained in advance, and retained by the student and all persons to whom the writing is submitted. It is permissible, with the consent of the professor, to use a paper submitted for course credit to satisfy the writing requirement as well. 6. It is a violation of this regulation to provide any written work to another student, with the knowledge that it will be submitted as the student’s original work in satisfaction of any course requirement or for any other school-related purpose. 7. Academic credit may be withheld for any work which violates this regulation. Academic credit awarded for work which is later discovered to have been submitted in violation of this regulation may be withdrawn. A degree awarded in part on the basis of such course credit may be revoked.

8. The presumptive sanction for a deliberate act of plagiarism is suspension or dismissal from the Law School.

9. This regulation applies to all work submitted by a student for any course or school-related activity. This includes not only course papers and examinations but also written work for the law reviews, moot court competitions and similar law school-related activities. Where original work is expected, the regulation applies to drafts as well as final submissions. The regulation does not apply to those unusual situations in which the student is not expected to submit original work. For example, it might not apply to drafting pleadings in a clinical setting.

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