“This proposition did not have in its genesis an anti-BSA aspect to it,” Kaufman said. “We thought BSA teaching assistants had done a good job and we praised them for it.”

In addition to its work in the FYL program, the BSA administers student course evaluations, runs the Ames moot court exercises, and organizes the Williston contract law simulation.

The report concluded that “the search should be for the best student teachers and that therefore the positions should be open to all students, not just those willing to become BSA members with all the present nonteaching commitments of such membership.”

But second-year law student Ronald M. Varnum, who is president of the BSA, challenged the FYL committee to show that any students have been discouraged from joining the BSA because of the organization’s nonteaching responsibilities.

“The committee offers no evidence that these students actually exist,” Varnum said.

Varnum, who taught mathematics at a Greensboro, N.C., high school for two years, said he saw the BSA as “the logical outlet for that passion [for teaching] once I arrived here at law school.”

Varnum said BSA members devote between eight and 30 hours a week to their teaching assistant responsibilities.

Several hundred students have signed a petition supporting a continued role for the BSA in the first-year course, Varnum said.

“We don’t oppose the reduction [in the number of FYL teaching assistants] per se...but we do think that we are the group that is best capable of fulfilling the role of student teachers in the program,” Varnum said.

Kaufman said that an implementation committee, whose members have yet to be appointed by Dean Elena Kagan, will determine the BSA’s ultimate role in the FYL program.

“The devil is in the implementation. The devil is in the details,” said second-year law student Daniel C. Richenthal, a member of the FYL committee. “But our committee didn’t come to conclusions about details and implementation.”

According to its report, the committee left unresolved the question “whether it would be feasible to restructure the BSA as a two-tiered organization, with teaching and nonteaching segments.”

But Varnum said “there is no guarantee that the BSA will have a position on the implementation committee.”

Kaufman said he is sympathetic to the BSA’s concerns.

“I understand why they were upset,” he said, adding that he has encouraged the organization’s leaders to circulate their views to students and faculty.