Babson Students Reflect on Winning Legal Research Competition with Papers and Presentations on Timely Topics
Co-authored by Babson students Juliana Bonilla, Ritik Chadha, and Rohan Thompson.
Thursday, August 5th, we competed in the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) student research paper and presentation contest. Like last year, the 2021 ALSB conference was online.
We wrote our papers as part of our business law course (Law 1000) under the guidance and support of Professor Adam Sulkowski. Professor Sulkowski not only supported us in the research process and through suggested editing of our papers, but also in the preparation for the oral presentations of our papers during the conference.
Our papers and presentations (we were judged on both) won first and second place in the category of papers presented by groups.
Ritik Chadha and Rohan Thompson’s team paper described the litigation battle between tech giant Apple and app developer Epic Games, looking to understand both the causes and the implications of such a landmark case.
Juliana Bonilla improved and presented her team’s paper about the eviction crisis in the United States (both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic) and possible solutions that many authors have suggested to the problem of large numbers of evictions.
This experience of submitting our final projects to the student paper competition taught us the importance of going beyond expectations. Besides working to get a good grade on the assignment, going the extra mile could be rewarding. In our case, we had the opportunity to meet amazing people and hear about the legal research projects they are working on. We were also able to share our work with people outside Babson College and connect closely with our professor.
We so often get stuck in the school mindset where everything boils down to a letter grade, but this experience expanded the application of our research and showed us new perspectives on something that we dedicated so much time and effort to understanding. As we had completed our papers in the fall semester, it was so interesting to revisit the material we studied almost a year later. Checking how accurate our research had been was a reflection that we very rarely have the chance to do in the normal school environment. Extending the significance of schoolwork beyond the classroom is what we think college should be all about, and Babson excels at offering its students the opportunities to do exactly that.
We – on the part of both us as students, and Professor Sulkowski, wish to publicly thank and acknowledge the invaluable help of one of Babson’s great research librarians: Daryl Bullis – thank you!