Author: Dean Rusk International Law Center

Former Nigeria prosecutor’s LLM year features US practice experience

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Among the many talented foreign-trained lawyers set to earn Georgia Law’s Master of Laws (LLM) degree this month is Gladys Ashiru, who arrived with considerable experience as a prosecutor in Nigeria. She’s enriched this experience this year: in addition to her academic studies and a professional development trip, Gladys has worked as a volunteer prosecutor here in Athens.

Having immigrated to the United States, Gladys chose to put her career back on track by pursuing an LLM at Georgia Law. She says she was impressed by the collegiality she encountered during a visit to campus, and swayed by LLM graduates who spoke glowingly of their experience here.

Gladys’ strong interest in criminal law prompted Laura Tate Kagel, our Center’s Director of International Professional Education, to connect her with the Athens-based Office of the District Attorney for the Western Judicial Circuit, whose staff includes a number of Georgia Law alums. Assistant District Attorney Paige Otwell (JD 88) became Gladys’ mentor and introduced her to District Attorney Ken Mauldin (JD 80). After Gladys enrolled in Mauldin’s Spring 2016 Trial Practice course, he offered her the opportunity to observe and help out in the D.A.’s office. With the semester now at an end, Gladys recounts:

“It was an amazing experience for me. The internship broadened my horizons and exposed me to perspectives different from mine, especially in areas relating to jury selection and trials.”

After commencement on May 21, Ashiru plans to take the Georgia and New York bar exams, and also hopes to contribute to legal reform in Nigeria. Although she says that Georgia Law was challenging, she also found it rewarding, and calls it

“the best choice I made!”

A world of issues addressed in new edition of Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

IMG_1031Four more than 4 decades, important articles on international, transnational, and comparative law and policy have found a publication home at Georgia law’s Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law. Volume 43 Issue 2, the latest edition of GJICL, has just been released and is available online.

The volume begins with three articles, by five scholars from Asia, Europe, and South America:

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► Declarations of Unconstitutionality in India and the U.K.: Comparing the Space for Political Response, by Chintan Chandrachud (left), candidate for Ph.D. in Law, University of Cambridge, England

faure► Industrial Accidents, Natural Disasters and “Act of God”, by: Professor Michael Faure (right), Professor of Comparative & International Environmental Law at Maastricht University’s Maastricht European Institute for Transnational Legal Research and Professor of Comparative Private Law & Economics at the Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics, Erasmus liuSchool of Law, both in the Netherlands; Dr. Liu Jing (left), postdoctoral researcher in Research Institute of Environmental Law, School of Law, Center of Cooperative Innovation for Judicial Civilization, Wuhan University, China, and Behavioral Approach of Contract & Tort at Erasmus andriUniversity Rotterdam; and Dr. Andri Wibisana (right), Lecturer at the Faculty of Law Universitas Indonesia in Jakarta

oyn► Public Law Litigation in the U.S. and in Argentina: Lessons From A Comparative Study, by Professor Martín Oyhanarte (left), Professor of Law at Universidad Austral and Universidad del Salvador  in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Three Notes, by alums who received their Georgia Law J.D.s in 2015, also appear in the volume:

broussard► A House Divided: The Human Rights Burden of Britain’s Family Migration Financial Requirements, by Courtney L. Broussard (right), Staff Attorney, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit

jang► Mental Capacity: Reevaluating the Standards, by Eulen E. Jang (left), PSJD Fellow, National Association for Law Placement, Washington, D.C.

jarrells► History, TRIPS, and Common Sense: Curbing the Counterfeit Drug Market in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Hannah Elizabeth Jarrells (right), Associate Attorney at the Atlanta law firm of Ferrer Poirot Wansbrough Feller Daniel & Abney

Honoring Judge Ward, rights pioneer

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Horace T. Ward, a human rights pioneer, died at age 88 over the weekend in Atlanta.

Described by the New Georgia Encyclopedia as “the first African American to challenge the racially discriminatory practices at the University of Georgia.” To be precise, he sought, unsuccessfully, to study law at the university. The law school paid tribute to him by way of this statement, issued today:

“We at the University of Georgia School of Law mourn the passing of a legal giant, the Honorable Horace Taliaferro Ward. A native of LaGrange, Georgia, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College and a master’s degree from Atlanta University before applying to Georgia Law in 1950. His application was denied, and it would be eleven years before the University of Georgia admitted African Americans as students. In 2014, the University conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree upon Ward – by then, a distinguished federal judge who had represented Martin Luther King, Jr. and others as a civil rights attorney, served in the U.S. Army in Korea, and been a Georgia state legislator. We at Georgia Law remain grateful for Judge Ward’s gracious acceptance of this belated and well-deserved recognition, and we express our sincere condolences to his family.”

(Above, a screenshot from a video of the May 9, 2014, commencement ceremony: Judge Horace T. Ward accepts honorary Doctor of Laws degree from University of Georgia President Jere Morehead, as Rebecca White, then Georgia Law’s dean, looks on. Behind Ward is Maurice Daniels, dean of the university’s School of Social Work and author of a 2001 biography of the judge.)

Women’s voices cast in leading role at 33d annual Edith House Lecture

evansLeading Georgia Law’s annual celebration of its 1st woman law graduate this year was an extra special, and especially inspiring, alumna.

Delivering the 33d annual Edith House Lecture, Stacey Godfrey Evans (left) treated students, faculty, staff, and others in the law school community to a talk entitled “The Voice of a Woman Lawyer: Why it Matters and How to Use It.”

It’s a subject for which she’s well qualified, as 3L Hannah Byars (below right), leader of the Women Law Students Association, made clear. Byars related that after Evans earned her J.D. in 2003, she practiced as an associate at BigLaw firm, then opened a small firm with a handful of colleagues. Evans established her own firm, S.G. Evans Law LLC, in 2014. And since 2011, she’s represented District 42, in Smyrna, as a Democrat in the Georgia State Assembly.hannah

Evans opened her talk by reciting the still-low percentages of women at high levels of the legal profession and politics, then urged the women in her audience to let their voices be heard.

“When you change who is in the room, you change the conversation,”

Evans said at one point, and added that women should not fear to be controversial when the situation merits. She concluded by encouraging women to run for office.

houseIt was a fitting tribute to the namesake of this lecture series, depicted at left: Edith House (1903-1987), whose portrait hangs in the law school rotunda. She and another student in the Class of 1925 were Georgia Law’s 1st women graduates. House was co-valedictorian, and went on to a distinguished career, including a stint as the 1st woman U.S. Attorney in Florida. Thanks to a Women Law Students Association initiative (see this great online scrapbook at p. 53), lectures have been given each year in her honor since 1983.

Global legal research online at SSRN

ssrn_shadowAs 2015-16 nears its close, we mark one of the new partnerships on which we embarked this academic year. In October, we began posting news of our scholarship at the Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Papers, a series in the vast Legal Scholarship Network of SSRN, the Social Science Research Network.

Our series highlights scholarly production at the University of Georgia Law, including writings by Georgia Law faculty and Center staff, as well as works appearing in our Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law and other publications. All the contributions discuss issues of international, comparative, transnational, and foreign affairs law and policy. The series thus augments the decades-old tradition by which the Dean Rusk International Law Center serves Georgia Law’s nucleus global research, education, and service.

Among the works published to date:

► The Testamentary Foundations of Commercial Arbitration, 30 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution (2015), by Dean Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge

► The Death of Deference and the Domestication of Treaty Law, Brigham Young University Law Review (forthcoming), by Professor Harlan Grant Cohen

► Judicial Federalism in the European Union, Houston Law Review (forthcoming), by Professor Michael Lewis Wells

► Enforcing Immigration Equity, 84 Fordham Law Review 661 (2015), by Professor Jason A. Cade

► A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the OECD’s International VAT/GST Guidelines, 18 Florida Tax Review 589 (2016), by Professor Walter Hellerstein

► Securing Child Rights in Time of Conflict, ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law (forthcoming), by Associate Dean Diane Marie Amann

► Toward Peace with Justice in Darfur: A Framework for Accountability, 18 U.C. Davis Journal of International Law and Policy 1 (2011), by Kathleen A. Doty, our Center’s Associate Director for Global Practice Preparation

View the papers are available online here or, even better, receive new postings through e-mail distribution by subscribing here.

Eastward bound, to meet potential LLMs in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest

Law students, lawyers, and legal academics in the Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic will soon have the opportunity for talk with a Dean Rusk International Law Center staffer about pursuing a degree at here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

logo-colorNext week, Laura Tate Kagel, our Center’s Director of International Professional Education, will take part in American universities fairs in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest, sponsored by EducationUSA, an arm of the U.S. Department of State.

llm_coverShe’ll be on hand personally to discuss the career benefits and special advantages of earning the Master of Law, or LL.M., degree at Georgia Law. (See prior posts about our current LLM students, as well as our hundreds of LLM alums, here.)

Interested persons may show up at the times and places below. And feel free to e-mail Dr. Kagel at lkagel[at]uga.edu in order to assure one-to-one meeting – or to correspond, in the event you’re unable to attend one of the fairs.

Monday, April 18, Prague: 15:00-18:00 at the Alchymist Hotel, Tržiště 19, Prague 1

Wednesday, April 20, Warsaw: 12:00-15:30 at the University of Warsaw Library, BUW, ul. Dobra 55/66, Warsaw

Friday, April 22, Budapest: 15:00- 19:00 at the Budapest Marriott Hotel, Apaczai Csere Janos u. 4. Budapest 1052

Hope to see you there!

D.C. week: Sohn Fellow Pentagon tour

pentagon1apr16This week in D.C.: In their first days volunteering at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, our Louis B. Sohn Professional Development Fellows have witnessed both a panoramic (and pan-American) Grotius Lecture by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and a witty talk by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.

Today, they’re on a behind-scenes tour of the Pentagon. Depicted at center is Kathleen A. Doty, Associate Director for Global Practice Preparation at our Dean Rusk International Law Center– a former Department of Navy lawyer, she arranged the visit. The Georgia Law students surrounding her are, from left, Hannah Mojdeh Williams, Victoria Aynne Barker, Katherine Nicole Richardson, and  Deborah Nogueira Yates.

D.C. bound, for ASIL Annual Meeting

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Students, faculty, and staff at Georgia Law are heading this week to Washington, D.C. – members and Academic Partner of the American Society of International Law, bound for ASIL’s 110th Annual Meeting.

It’s always a special time of year for us at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, given our long tradition with the Society – not least because Louis B. Sohn, our inaugural Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, served as an ASIL President. In his honor, the Center has awarded Louis B. Sohn Professional Development Fellows to our 1 LLM, 1 MSL, and 3 JD students who will volunteer at the meeting. They’re pictured above, standing tall with the portrait of Professor Sohn which overlooks our Center’s Louis B. Sohn Library on International Relations.  The Sohn Fellows are, from left, Hannah Mojdeh Williams, Victoria Aynne Barker, Katherine Nicole Richardson, Deborah Nogueira Yates, and Bradley C. Bowlin.

Also ASIL bound are:

copydiane► Diane Marie Amann, Georgia Law’s Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives, current holder of the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a former Vice President of the Society. Amann, who leads our Center, will take part in a panel discussion of the new International Committee of the Red Cross Commentary on the First Geneva Convention at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 30. Her talk is a forerunner to a planned Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law conference on the Commentary, to be held on Friday, September 23, 2016.

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► Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen, who serves on ASIL’s Executive Council and as Managing Editor of its AJIL Unbound.

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► Kathleen A. Doty, our Center’s Associate Director for Global Practice Preparation, and a past Attorney-Editor at ASIL. Formerly an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Department of the Navy, Doty also serves as Chair of ASIL’s Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament Interest Group, also known as NACDIG. In that capacity, she’ll be moderating a panel entitled The Emergence of Cyber Deterrence: Implications for International Law, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 31. Speakers will be Gary Brown, Professor of Cyber Security at the Marine Corps University; Jonathan E. Davis, Attorney-Adviser, Office of the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State; and Tara McGraw Swaminatha, Of Counsel at the Washington office of DLA Piper LLP. Here’s the panel description, as set out at page 37 of the Annual Meeting Program:

“Military and civilian policymakers increasingly stress the importance of deterring other nations from engaging in computer network exploitation and attacks against the United States. Resulting from the behavior of China, Iran, and North Korea respecting offensive cyber capabilities, deterrence features prominently in the new Department of Defense cyber strategy, the response of the Obama administration to high profile attacks, and the Congressional debate around cyber issues. This panel will explore the emergence of cyber deterrence, and new trends in cyber security generally, as they relate to international law. Some important areas of concern include: how the emphasis on deterrence might affect the law on State responsibility, non-intervention, counter-measures, and the use of force; whether moving to strengthen cyber deterrence requires changing the permissive nature of international law on espionage; what new norms might be needed to support and stabilize cyber deterrence, such as confidence-building measures, arms control rules, and norms on escalation control; and how the emergence of cyber deterrence might affect other cyber issues important in international law, including Internet governance, digital commerce, and human rights. The session will also analyze what international legal lessons might be learned from nuclear and non-nuclear contexts where States have adopted deterrence strategies.”

See you there!

Different kind of March Madness: Georgia Law’s Vis Moot Elite 8

Vis_editedThe team that the University of Georgia School of Law fielded in this year’s Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot in Vienna, Austria, bested a team from the University of Belgrade to advance to the quarterfinals, known as the Round of 8.

The impressive showing marked another excellent trip to Vienna for our students, who comprised one of the more than 300 teams that competed from all over the world in this 23d edition of the Vis Moot. The only U.S. teammembers to compete past the quarterfinals, they are, from left above: Ronald Chicken, coach Sara Burns, Emily Cox, Bethany Edmondson, and student coach Stephen Morrison.

So proud of our Elite 8 competitors!

Today in Brussels, from an alum & member of our Dean Rusk Council

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David Hull, a member of our Dean Rusk International Law Council, today published his thoughts about this morning‘s terrorist attacks in the city with which he 1st became acquainted as a Georgia Law summer study abroad student in the early 1980s: Brussels, Belgium.

A partner and specialist in European Union law at the firm of Van Bael & Bellis, David wrote in the Atlanta legal paper, Daily Report, that he tends to be “sanguine” about bad news, but added that these attacks hit very “close to home,” even in “their sheer randomness.”

He expressed concern about “a tendency to conflate the refugee crisis with the terrorist threat,” and “hope that a settlement can be reached in Syria in the near future and a more stable situation achieved in the Middle East generally.” Both, he concluded, require “leaders with courage and vision to find workable and lasting solutions to unprecedented challenges.”

Our thoughts are with David, his family, and the many other members of the Georgia Law community in and around Belgium, a country with which we’ve partnered since the early 1970s.