LAAB Trivia Night
When: February 7, 2012
Where: USC Law Cafe
What: LAAB hosted its annual Trivia Night and welcomed 91 contestants to the board-created competition of knowledge and factoids. The teams persevered through 6 rounds of questions ranging from fashion and sports to geography and history. As the drinks flowed, so did the fervor with which teams tried to attain the answers to the increasingly difficult questions. The victor was two-time winner “Touched by an Uncle.” Best team name by cheers and elimination went to “Backdoor No Baby.”
For pictures of the event, click here.
Winter Trip – San Diego
When: January 5-8, 2012
Where: San Diego Coastkeeper, The Sierra Club, Cesar Chavez Park, Chollas Canyon & Jerome’s Warehouse
What: More than 60 LAABers (The biggest group EVER for a Winter Trip) took over San Diego for thee days of work, and three nights of fun. Students were either assigned to San Diego Coastkeeper, The Sierra Club, or to a manual labor team.
Students who were sent to San Diego Coastkeeper donated just under 600 hours of time and were assigned to either the Cigarette Butt Project, or the Stormwater Project. The cigarette butt team researched existing business owner liability for cigarette butts, prepared an annotated bibliography of studies about business owner litter best practices, and designed and pilot tested a business owner litter/cigarette butt survey. The second group focused on Coastkeeper’s pollution patroller program. The team field-tested the existing program and new technology we are hoping to launch related to the program. They patrolled four cities, gave feedback on the program and technology, prepared new training materials, and laid out a framework for a more efficient and effective pollution patroller program.
Students who were sent to The Sierra Club were tasked with legal research and memo writing on a variety of environmental issues. Topics included water use in San Diego, transportation projects in San Diego, bacteria, and the logistics involved in joinder.
Meanwhile, the manual labor team had a different project each day. On the first day, the team descended on Cesar Chavez Park and cleaned the waterfront, sidewalks, gutters, and grass. Several pounds of trash were removed and the park was left spotless. Day two sent the crew to Chollas Canyon. More than 20 pounds of garbage was removed from the canyon before it would up in the ocean. Some of the more disturbing items removed were used diapers, an umbrella, and a crack pipe. The third day saw the students switching gears from picking up trash to organizing books, as they volunteered at the San Diego Book Project, which gives away donated books to those in need. Books were distributed to teachers for use in class, troops deployed overseas, local battered women’s shelters, and other groups in need.
Pictures of the trip can be seen here.
LAAB Poker Night
When: October 12, 2011
Doors at 6:30-11:00 p.m.
Where: Law Cafe
Poker Night went off without a hitch! Sky’s Tacos provided awesome food, and the drinks flowed all night. Professors Chasalow and Lyon both came and made it to the final table, but everyone eventually fell to reigning LAAB Poker Champion Matthew Gertler!
Pictures from the last part of the night can be seen here.
Saints/Packers @ Traditions
When: September 8, 2011
5:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Where: Traditions (right below Moreton Fig)
Our first event of the year was a COMPLETE success! About 100 USC Law students and their friends came out to watch the game, pregame bar review, and support LAAB. We raised a good amount of money, and had a blast doing it. We hope everyone had as much fun as we did (even though the Saints lost).
New Orleans 2011
USC Law’s LAAB coordinated the effort for students to travel to New Orleans, where they provided legal services and performed manual labor in the lower 9th Ward, one of the areas that was hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina. In one week, the group performed over 2,200 hours of collective community service.
Though Hurricane Katrina was over five years ago, the impact of Hurricane Katrina in
the Lower 9th Ward is still immense. The lower 9th ward only has 20% of its pre-Katrina
population and is still devastated by a lack of resources including schools, hospitals and
elderly care. Working with the Holly Cross Neighborhood Association, students worked to
help residents rebuild their homes, worked on community services such as a neighborhood
garden project and performed blight beautification on the many abandoned lots.
Megan Hopkins, one of the twenty-two USC Law students who worked at the New Orleans Office of the Public Defender, says “We live in a system of adversariality, and the systems fails if either side overpowers the other in resources and staff . . .what we did as volunteers was even the playing field, if only for a week.”
As trip organizer Ian Maglardy puts it, “LAAB, for me, is the culmination of everything that I wanted to experience in law school. The guiding principles of this year’s LAAB Board and Trip were simple: provide an opportunity for law students to learn valuable skills and experience new and dynamic challenges in an unfamiliar environment while providing the greater New Orleans area with needed legal skills and manual labor. Furthermore, a law student’s participation in LAAB demonstrates part of what sets lawyers aside from other professionals – a willingness, and indeed a positive moral duty, to lend their time, knowledge, and intelligence to benefitting the community. On a less esoteric level, LAAB is the single best opportunity to get to know a group of people whom you share hundreds of hours of class time with, but don’t often get to know well on a personal level.”
Pictures (of some) of the stuff that happened can be seen here.