To make our presence known on campus and to encourage participation amongst the incoming 1Ls our chapter hosted a “spirit week” during the first week of school. The first day was “Looking Sharp,” during which we encouraged them to dress well to make a good impression on their new professors and the 1L class. Next was “Celebrating Your True Colors,” where we had our members wear their undergraduate shirts to open up opportunities to engage with 1Ls from their respective undergraduate institutions. Third was “Go Blue!” during which our members wore their Michigan attire to demonstrate that we are part of the larger community.

On Thursday, we wore our Federalist Society merchandise to finally reveal to the 1Ls that they were talking to the enemy all week long… Just kidding, it was to promote our happy hour later that evening. Lastly, we wore red, white, and blue on Friday to celebrate our great nation, preceding the Labor Day holiday weekend.

To increase engagement with the wider law school student body and advertise our events to faculty, we host advertising events in the primary common areas of the law school. Typically, we set up two poster boards: one board shows a large-scale blow-up of our event poster, while the other has a poll or question for students to engage with as they pass by. As students come to fill out our poll, we take the opportunity to formally invite them to our events, and we encourage them to come. From this, we are able to engage with a group of students who may not respond to mass email blasts or bulletin board notices. As a bonus to this type of advertising, even students who do not engage directly with our tabling and did not fill out our polls are forced to see Federalist Society event details as they walk between their classes.

On Constitution Day, we celebrated by asking students to vote on their favorite and least favorite Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Students voted by placing a golden star or red sticker on each one. This sparked great conversations, partly because each person had a different criteria for determining what constituted the best or worse amendment. Great debate sparked, and the results (as demonstrated by stickers on that poster) were fascinating.

Most recently, we used this strategy to advertise our inaugural Judge Joan L. Larsen Speaker Series, featuring Judge Paul Matey and Professor Adrian Vermeule. Alongside a blow-up of the event information, we asked the community to mark their favorite piece of legal media. A Few Good Men and Better Call Saul were the favorites of the law school community. But more importantly than probing our classmates’ television preferences, our poll spread the word about the upcoming Larsen lecture and helped increase turnout for our flagship lecture series. As a result, more of our law school community was able to engage and wrestle with the ideas proposed by our panelists.

Even seemingly minor events such as table advertising have proven to be an influential part of our programming at Michigan Law. By advertising in-person in highly trafficked areas of our campus, our members are better able to encourage attendance at our events, and we are better able to answer any questions that our classmates might have about our programming efforts.

For the Michigan Law Federalist Society, the success of our members is one of our top priorities. To facilitate this goal, we match up every 1L with one or more upperclassmen mentors, using an algorithm focusing on similarities in factors like geographic interests, practice area, extracurriculars, religion, etc. Mentors meet with their mentees at least once per semester (although they are encouraged to meet more) to talk about firm applications, clerkships, classes, grades, and more. We try to subsidize at least one coffee or lunch for each mentor/mentee pair! The program has worked well to allow the 1Ls to get to know the upperclassmen, as the mentor can introduce the mentee to other members once they get to know each other.

To provide an opportunity for students, alumni, local lawyers and judges to get together and soak up Michigan’s unique game-day atmosphere, our chapter hosts tailgates before most home games. We have had judges come and bring their clerks, invited members from rival schools’ chapters, and even had lawyers from the area see our signs and stop by for some food and friendly debate.