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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: September 18, 2004
Latest Update: September 18, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Lecture Notes, September 18, 2004As we tried to look at the magic numbers fiasco as an issue for governance discourse, I used many terms that need definition. Some that I remember are:
- legal cause of action This isn't a legal issue, but you define a validity claim in much the same way you would a legal cause of action. You review the facts of the incident and then ask who was harmed, by what were they harmed, how is the institution involved, and under what reasoning would you expect the institution to fix the wrong?
With magic numbers, we would want our validity claim to reflect that the magic numbers were an institutional process, initiated by the institution. We would want to state the difficulty your teacher had in obtaining the numbers, even when we knew we had at least one class that needed many adds because pre-registration had been flawed. Because of the difficulty in getting the numbers, and because many of them were previously used and so not accepted when we did get them, and because the earlier mixup with registration in moot court meant their were lots of students facing this predicament, some of us were unable to get to the registration office before they closed on Thursday. Nevermind that many of us are night students for whom their hours aren't functional. Since this was a university initiated process, and we have been penalized through no fault of our own, we believe that we have cause to ask that the university correct the situation. See the similarity to legal cause of action in a law case.
For there to be a legal cause of action someone has to have not done something we can show they ought to have done, and we have to show that we were harmed by that omission. In this case, we claim that the magic numbers should have been issued to us in greater numbers, sooner, so we could have met the university-set deadlines. We are also claiming that since the university set the deadlines to start with, it has the power to make an exception when its process didn't work for us. And we're asking it to make that exception.
- appropriate remedy A remedy that is appropriate to undo or make up for the harm that occurred. Often when we complain that something has gone wrong, we fail to consider the remedy, or what could be done to restore things to their proper order. In the law, we are asked to state an appropriate remedy or damages. In a validity claim with our own school, no one's going to tell us to express it that way, but we need to think of it in those terms. (Called thinking like a lawyer.)
In our case, an appropriate remedy is apparent. We need registration in the classes for which we were given magic numbers, and remission of the fines we were told we would be charged over the magic numbers situation.
