Draft:Board of Student Advisers

The Harvard Board of Student Advisers ("BSA") is Harvard Law School's oldest service organization. The Board is one of three honors societies at the law school, along with the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. The BSAs serve as teaching fellows in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program, as peer advisers to members of the first-year class and transfer students , and as administrators of the Ames Moot Court Competition.

Notable members include Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Judge Reena Raggi for United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit , Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod for United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Judge John Mendez of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), U.S. Representative Anthony Brown (D-MD) , U.S. Representative Katie Porter (D-CA), former University of Colorado Law School Dean James Anaya, and Grammy Award-winning producer Clive Davis.

Overview
Today, the Board has forty-two student members, selected based on grades, editing and feedback skills, and an essay. A committee of current BSA members selects new BSAs with review by Susannah Barton Tobin, the head of the LRW program, and with faculty and Climenko Fellow input. Three BSAs are assigned to support each section of LRW, which is taught primarily by a Climenko Fellow. Climenko Fellows are promising legal scholars with high academic achievements and a strong interest in teaching, who spend two years teaching LRW and preparing scholarship for entry into the teaching market.

History
The Board was founded in 1910 to “educate and assist students.” The Board's membership was originally chosen by the faculty. Board members focused mainly on the Ames Moot Court Competition: writing the cases to be argued, teaching legal research, and organizing independent law clubs so that all first-year students could participate.

The Board's activities gradually broadened to include teaching introduction to lawyering. This course was later renamed Legal Reasoning and Argument (“LRA”), the precursor to today’s Legal Research and Writing ("LRW") Program. In the fall of 1998, an LRA Committee was formed to explore ways to reform the program. These proposals would eventually lead to the LRW program in place today. Since its founding, the Board has been able to achieve gender parity in its membership.