By Margaret Hawrywk
The Student Government Association (SGA) no longer holds the final verdict regarding issues with University clubs and organizations. SGA’s judicial panel is now the Supreme Court of the University’s student government system.
“The Supreme Court is necessary in the way the U.S. works, why not a judicial panel at Hofstra?” Panel Justice Leela Ramdeen, a sophomore business and philosophy major, said.
Established in October 2004, the judicial panel was created to make dealings between SGA and clubs more fair and unbiased, Matt Anderson, chief justice of the panel and a senior secondary education and history major, said.
Anderson said he wanted to create the panel because SGA was not making sound judgments, and he wanted clubs to be able to appeal to a neutral body.
Anderson used the recently denied proposal of the South Korean club as an example. The club was denied by SGA, which claimed that an Asian club already existed, while Italian and Greek clubs exist rather than a European club.
“Before, if you had a problem with SGA, you had to appeal to SGA,” Anderson said. “Now SGA is more like the legislative branch and the panel is the judicial.”
The judicial panel, according to its constitution, holds original jurisdiction over “SGA and its consistory, two or more SGA clubs, SGA and an SGA club, an SGA club and a student of Hofstra University and Student Activities (enforcing an SGA policy) and an SGA club or student of Hofstra University.”
The panel had to draft its own constitution and be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate before it could be recognized as an organization on campus. A constitutional amendment also had to be passed in the SGA constitution, Anderson said.
The panel consists of five justices, including the chief justice and a legal aide, all of whom were appointed by SGA President Heather Gibbons and then approved by the Senate.
“The concern [of the Senate] was that we wouldn’t be fair or experienced,” Tole Zacharia, a senior political science major and panel justice, said. “Therefore, the candidates were interviewed by Senate members before they could assume their positions.”
In the future, justices will be elected by the student body during SGA elections, which occur near the end of the spring semester, Anderson said. Since the organization was founded before elections, panel members were appointed for this term, but must face reelection later in the semester.
So far, the panel has not heard any cases because the three complaints filed were all reconsidered by SGA when the association received
the appeals.
“We’ve forced SGA to reanalyze itself and its decisions,” Anderson said, adding that since the founding of the judicial panel, there have not been as many clubs denied by SGA.
According to its Constitution, if a party wishes to file a grievance, they must fill out appropriate paper work to the panel where the justices decide if the case should come to court. Once a court date is set, the parties must file briefs 48-hours before the hearing.
The majority opinions of the justices are delivered as the “Opinion of the Court” and are final. The decisions and case records are available to the public and can serve as precedents for future incidents.
The justices are confident that the panel “Can make a lot of changes on campus as long as there is good leadership and people are willing to change things,” Zacharia said.