Month: August 2020

Georgia Law 3L Devon Pawloski reflects on significance of her Global Externship at DC-Cam in Phnom Penh


Today we welcome a guest post by Devon E. Pawloski, a member of the University of Georgia School of Law Class of 2021 who is enrolled in the JD/MHP, or Juris Doctor and Master of Historic Preservation dual degree curriculum. The summer after her first year of law school, Devon benefited from a GEO – a Global Externship Overseas, administered by Georgia Law’s Dean Rusk International Law Center. Her post describes that experience and then reflects on how it helped guide her career preparation.

I spent my 1L summer working at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam, in Phnom Penh as a Georgia Law Global Extern Overseas. DC-Cam is a nongovernmental organization that archives documents and objections for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and also creates educational materials, curates historic exhibits, and builds programming to promote reconciliation regarding the Khmer Rouge genocide.

My main project connected Cambodia’s rich cultural heritage to DC-Cam’s education and reconciliation goals. Destruction of cultural heritage is often not acknowledged as a significant part of war and genocide. But throughout its history Cambodia’s heritage has been plundered, under French colonization, the Lon Nol civil war, the Khmer Rouge genocide, Vietnamese occupation, and even today. My research focused on the prevention of looting and the incorporation of cultural heritage education in schools, with the ultimate goal of helping Cambodia to heal from the Khmer Rouge atrocities by rallying around Cambodia’s heritage.

Under the guidance of American attorney-advisors, I worked with the DC-Cam staff and a Tulane Law student, Ben Evans, to document the state of cultural heritage looting in Cambodia. Ben and I first researched international heritage conventions and Cambodia’s cultural heritage laws from the French colonial period (1863 to 1953) to the present. We then selected two sites to use as case studies, in which we interviewed government officials, police officers, soldiers, museum curators, teachers, students, and other locals about their personal experiences with looting and their knowledge of cultural heritage laws. The sites were:

  • Angkor Borei, the location of the ancient Funan Empire capital. Looting of Angkor Borei dates to the French colonial period, when French scholars and others took decorative elements and statuary from Phnom Da, a nearby temple that, along with Angkor Borei, has been tentatively nominated to the UNESCO World Heritage list. The French made meaningful attempts to restore portions of the temple, but the damage was done. The temple’s remaining statuary was removed for safekeeping in the 1990s. However, villagers still find remnants of the ancient kingdom in their backyards. Until recently, it was common for villagers to dig for beads, pots, statues, and other small items to sell for food and clothing. Local middlemen approached the villagers to request items, which were then smuggled across the border. In 2011, looting slowed down after an information campaign about cultural heritage laws. (pictured at top left, Devon, as part of her field research, interviews a nun in Wat Kamnou, Angkor Borei) 
  • Ta Moan, an 11th century temple which sits on the contested border between Cambodia and Thailand. Smugglers toted off almost all of Ta Moan’s statuary to Thailand during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 2009 and 2011, fighting broke out between Cambodia and Thailand along the border, including within the temple complex itself. In 2011, the countries reached a ceasefire, but armed Khmer and Thai soldiers still occupy the site. (pictured at top right, part of Ta Moan)

This field research led to a paper, “Protecting Cambodia’s Heritage: An Exploration of International and Domestic Law,” which described the current legal historic preservation framework in Cambodia and the lack of enforcement of these laws, then suggested mechanisms for looting prevention. Suggestions includes local cultural heritage education in secondary schools and  heritage protection education for soldiers, by means of DC-Cam’s genocide education program. To help DC-Cam implement this, I drafted a cultural heritage education syllabus with reading materials and activity suggestions that can be added as a final chapter to future editions of DC-Cam’s genocide education textbook.

In addition to this work, I was able to explore many beautiful places throughout Cambodia, including Siem Reap, famous for its Angkor Wat temple complex, and Kep, a beach town with French colonial architecture. When I finished my GEO, I traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I even gained a few new skills in Khmer and Vietnamese cooking classes, which have been fun to brush up in these recent months of quarantine.

* * * *

The highlight of my law school experience, my Summer 2018 GEO in Cambodia has since influenced my educational and professional path. When I returned from Cambodia, I dove into international law to contextualize my summer experience. I took courses in international law, including International Human Rights with Professor Diane Marie Amann and International Legal Research with Professor Anne Burnett, and I worked with Professor Kate Doty on the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law.

When I applied for the University of Georgia Master of Historic Preservation degree program later that year, I wrote about my international heritage law research in Cambodia. Once I was admitted to the program, I wrote about international heritage law and repatriation of Native American artifacts. Although a master’s thesis about international heritage law is not feasible during this pandemic, the skills that I gained during my GEO, including research and communication across cultural boundaries, will be fundamental to my research.

My GEO is also provided an excellent foundation for the beginning of my legal career. I have been asked about my GEO in every job interview I have had since my 1L summer. Interviewers can easily understand my passion for cultural heritage, international law, and even environmental law when I am asked about my incredible experience in Cambodia. I am not sure where my post-law school career will take me, but I know that I will continue to volunteer with my friends and colleagues at the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

Georgia Law Appellate Clinic secures at-risk client’s release from immigration detention center

The Appellate Litigation Clinic here at the University of Georgia School of Law has secured the release from immigration detention of a Cuban client who suffers from asthma and a history of cancer.

The 26 year old client, who has no criminal history, had come to the United States to avoid repeated police beatings for his protests against the government in Cuba. He had been held for nineteen months without a bond hearing at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, where as of mid-August 2 inmates had died from COVID-19 and more than 150 had been infected.

Students working through the clinic contended that their client’s medical condition increased the risk that while in detention during the present pandemic, he too would contract the novel coronavirus disease. They litigated his case in many administrative and judicial forums: a hearing on a motion for bond in Stewart Immigration Court; multiple parole requests to ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; a habeas petition before the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia; and an opening brief and motion to expedite before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Working on the case were Addison Smith and Spencer D. Woody, both of whom earned their Juris Doctor degrees this past spring, along with 3L Steven L. Miller and 2Ls Christopher O. Brock, Destiny J. Burch and Maria C. “Mia” Hughes.

The merits appeal and detention appeal both continue even though the client has been released from ICE custody. Under the supervision of Thomas V. Burch and Anna White Howard, who direct Georgia Law’s Appellate Litigation Clinic, students will continue to pursue an Eleventh Circuit judgment in their client’s favor.

(Credit for photo of the Elbert P. Tuttle Courthouse in Atlanta, home to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit)

Georgia Law, ASIL to cosponsor conference on legal responsibility of corporations and nation-states

  • When private companies perform governmental functions and governments own companies, which acts should be attributed to the state?
  • Which should be attributed to the corporation?
  • And whose religious beliefs, speech rights, and moral standing can those entities claim?

These questions and more will be explored in The Law and Logics of Attribution: Constructing the Identity and Responsibility of States and Firms, a 2-day online conference that our Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, will cohost next month.

Melissa “MJ” Durkee, Allen Post Professor at Georgia Law, is leading the event, which will bring together a multinational group of scholars in law and social sciences. It’s cosponsored by the American Society of International Law and ASIL’s Interest Group on International Legal Theory. Durkee serves as Vice Chair of that interest group; Chair is her Georgia Law colleague Harlan G. Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of our Center. Registration is available here.

Scheduled to speak at the conference, which will take place 1-5 p.m. Friday, September 11, and Friday, September 18:

◄ Olabisi Akinkugbe, Assistant Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, Canada

► William C. Banks, Board of Advisors Distinguished Professor, Syracuse University College of Law, New York

◄ Joshua Barkan, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Georgia

► Kristen Boon, Miriam T. Rooney Professor of Law, Seton Hall School of Law, New Jersey

◄ Rachel Brewster, Jeffrey and Bettysue Hughes Professor of Law, Duke Law School, North Carolina

► David Ciepley, Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, California

◄ Laura Dickinson, Oswald Symister Colclough Research Professor of Law, George Washington School of Law, District of Columbia

► Melissa “MJ” Durkee, Allen Post Professor, University of Georgia School of Law

◄ Benjamin Edwards, Associate Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

► James Gathii, Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Illinois

◄ Sarah Haan, Associate Professor of Law, Washington and Lee School of Law, Virginia

► Catherine Hardee, Associate Professor of Law, California Western School of Law

◄ Doreen Lustig, Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Israel

► Kish Parella, Associate Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law, Virginia

◄ Dalia Palombo, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

► Mikko Rajavuori, Academy of Finland Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Eastern Finland Law School

◄ Ingrid Wuerth, Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law, Vanderbilt School of Law, Tennessee

 

They’ll be examining aspects of the conference’s concept note:

“In international law, scholars and practitioners struggle to attribute rights and responsibilities between state and private entities in areas as diverse as military contracting, environmental accountability, human rights, international investment, and cyber espionage and warfare. In the corporate governance realm, attributing responsibility to entities is increasingly challenging in the context of globally dispersed corporate families with intricate parent-subsidiary structures; identity attribution has also produced headlining debates.

“While attribution questions fuel important conversations in both corporate and international law, the two literatures are not often in conversation. Questions of attribution in both domains nevertheless are becoming more complex and urgent, and the fields increasingly intersect: In some areas of law, attribution doctrines must determine the dividing line between states and firms. Doctrines of attribution construct the public domain, and thereby also the private. Attribution questions in both domains reinvigorate classic inquiries about the nature of a corporation, the relationship between private entities and the state, and the proper function of the law in mediating between the two.

“This conference will draw together corporate and international legal scholars, as well as thinkers outside the law, in order to cross-pollinate these two fields and the questions at their intersection, and to unearth promising theoretical tools. It will consider theoretical and doctrinal approaches to attribution, potential consequences of these approaches, and whether they may reconcile the ambiguities and deficiencies that drive current debates. The project aims to offer a new point of entry to enduring theoretical and doctrinal questions about the nature of corporations, of states, and of the relationship between them. It is particularly relevant at a time where corporations are ‘jurisdictionally ambiguous and spatially diffuse,’ states are deferential, dependent or outflanked, and multilateralism is at an ebb.”

Full details, including registration for this online event, are available here.

Georgia Law Prof. Cohen presents “Nations and Markets” at International Economic Law and Policy seminar

Harlan Cohen, who is Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, recently presented his paper, “Nations and Markets,” in the International Economic Law and Policy work-in-progress seminar.

IELAP is a London-based series (currently online) convened by: Dr. Federico Ortino, Reader of International Economic Law, King’s College London; Dr. Lauge Poulsen, Associate Professor in International Political Economy and Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science, University College London; and Dr. Mona Pinchis-Paulsen , Assistant Professor at the Department of Law, London School of Economics.

Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen on “Metaphors of International Law”

Harlan G. Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law, has posted “Metaphors of International Law”, to appear in International Law’s Invisible Frames – Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes.

Set to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021, the volume is co-edited by Andrea Bianchi, Professor of International Law at Switzerland’s Graduate Institute Geneva, and Moshe Hirsch, Maria Von Hofmannsthal Chair in International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Cohen presented the essay at a European Society of International Law workshop in Israel last December (prior post).

Here’s the abstract:

This chapter explores international law in search of its hidden and not-so-hidden metaphors. In so doing, it discovers a world inhabited by states, where rules are mined or picked when ripe, where trade keeps boats forever afloat on rising tides. But is also unveils a world in which voices are silenced, inequality is ignored, and hands are washed of responsibility.

International law is built on metaphors. Metaphors provide a language to describe and convey the law’s operation, help international lawyers identify legal subjects and categorize situations in doctrinal categories, and provide normative justifications for the law. Exploring their operation at each of these levels, this chapter describes the ways metaphors allow international lawyers to build a shared, tangible universe of legal meaning. But it also reveals how metaphors simultaneously help hide international law’s dark side, blind international lawyers to alternative ways of organizing the world, and prejudge legal outcomes. Metaphors, a key building block of the international law we know, become key also to its demolition, restoration, or remodeling.

The chapter is now available at SSRN.