Coalition for Student & Academic Rights (CO-STAR)

The Coalition for Student & Academic Rights is a non-profit network of lawyers who help college students and professors with their legal problems. While we offer a number of services--legal counseling, mediation, on-campus educational programs--our primary goal is to educate the academic community about the law and their rights. To enable them to help themselves. By doing this, we create a more engaged and active citizenry. Our services are available to all members of higher education communities, including:

* individual students;
* student groups and organizations;
* individual professors;
* professional teaching organizations;
* administrators;
* student publications and their editorial staffs;
* fraternities and sororities;
* sports clubs and teams; and
* any other members of an academic communityAs a group, college students are eager, enthusiastic and prone to trouble. Their activities run the gamut from social activism to the socially unacceptable. And whether they're funneling beer or trying to free Mumia, they need to know their rights.

Today, the law invades almost every aspect of campus life. Just logging on to the school's computer system, for example, opens a student to a myriad of legal issues: Can the school monitor the web sites students visit? What about pages viewed while at the university library? Or on a privately owned computer in the dorms?

But, practical legal advice is hard to come by for the nation's 15 million college students. For the most part, they don't have ready access to lawyers and don't personally have the skills to defend their rights: CO-STAR was founded to fill this need.

The only organization of its kind, CO-STAR provides advice and advocacy to students and student groups about their academic and constitutional rights on campus. Each year, CO-STAR receives more than 10,000 requests for help. With the aid of a national network of volunteer attorneys, students are given cogent and understandable facts about the law as it affects them. They are given the tools they need to confront and solve their problems. CO-STAR never simply steps in and solves their problems for them, rather students are guided and encouraged to reach their own resolutions.

This is because one of CO-STAR's primary goals is to politically empower today's students– to initiate them into civic life. Showing college students that they can understand the law and use it to solve their own problems is an important step in the democratic learning process. A student who successfully asserts his or her constitutional rights in a campus judicial proceeding today may use those same rights later in life to better society.

If you would like more information about CO-STAR or its programs please visit www.co-star.org. CO-STAR is a non-partisan, non-profit organization.

Address: P.O. Box 491, Solebury, PA 18963-0491
Phone: 215-862-9096
Fax: 215-862-9557
E-mail: lindsay@co-star.org

Web: Coalition for Student & Academic Rights (CO-STAR)