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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.)

Antiquities trafficking said to fuel transnational mayhem by Daesh et al.

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Alumna Tess Davis, 2d from left, met with Georgia Law 1Ls after her lecture; from left, Hannah Williams, Ava Goble & Karen Hays. Hannah will work on cultural heritage issues this summer through a Global Externship Overseas (GEO) at the Cambodia Ministry of Culture & Fine Arts, Department of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

“As long as there have been tombs, there have been tomb raiders.”

So began the terrific talk on trafficking that Tess Davis, Executive Director of the D.C.-based Antiquities Coalition, delivered to a rapt University of Georgia audience this week.

Having conceded the point quoted at top, Davis stressed that today the problem is much different and much greater. On the list of lucrative transnational organized crime, she asserted, antiquities trafficking places 3d, right behind arms trafficking and drug trafficking.

The threat is not simply one of criminal behavior, she continued. Rather, Davis stressed that profits from antiquities trafficking – profits believed to be in the millions of dollars – provide revenue vital for the nonstate actor waging armed conflict in Syria and Iraq. That entity calls itself “Islamic State” and is often labeled “ISIS” or “ISIL” in the media; taking a lead from diplomats in France and, recently, the United States, Davis preferred “Daesh,” the group’s Arabic acronym, for the simple reason that “they hate to be called that.”

Initially trained as an archeologist, Davis began to focus on legal means to combat antiquities trafficking while still a student at Georgia Law. Since earning her J.D. in 2009, she’s been a leader at the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage and in the American Society of International Law Cultural Heritage & the Arts Interest Group, a researcher at Scotland’s University of Glasgow, a member of Georgia Law’s Dean Rusk International Law Center Council, and, as the photo above demonstrates, a mentor to Georgia Law students and other young lawyers interested in working in the field. Her efforts to help repatriate antiquities stolen from Cambodia earned multiple mentions in The New York Times.

Her talk drew links between the looting of cultural heritage during and after the 1970s Khmer Rouge reign of terror and current looting in the Middle East today. In both instances, she said, “cultural cleansing” – in the contemporary case, the destruction and thievery of monuments sacred to moderate Muslims and others – precedes and parallels efforts to erase and subjugate the humans who venerate those monuments. It’s a state of affairs documented in her Coalition’s new report, “Culture Under Threat.”

“The world failed Cambodia,”

Davis said, then expressed optimism at growing political will to do something about the Middle East. She advocated enactment of S. 1887, the Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act now working its way through Congress. The legislation, whose cosponsors include a Georgia U.S. Senator, David Perdue, is urgent: Davis estimated that U.S. buyers represent 43% of the current demand for looted Syrian antiquities.

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!

Ambassadorial briefing on Venezuela

wac_vz-eventEarlier this week, Dean Rusk International Law Center staffer Martica Marín and I attended an excellent event at Atlanta’s World Affairs Council: “Venezuela: A Crisis at our Doorstep.” It featured a conversation between the two ambassadors at left: Roger Noriega, former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States. Posing questions was Council President Charles Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.

Ambassador Noriega emphasized the importance of the crisis in Venezuela to U.S. interests not only because of its proximity to the United States, but also because, he said, it is serving as a breeding ground for drug smuggling, money laundering, and support of global terrorist networks. He warned that should Venezuela become a failed state, the vacuum of power could worsen this situation. He opined that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro‘s control over the country’s situation was tenuous, and said that the likelihood of violence during a regime change and a refugee crisis was high.

On a positive note, Noriega said he was encouraged by the opposition party’s success in December’s parliamentary elections. Both he and Ambassador Shapiro stressed, to the large number of Venezuelans in the audience, that political organization would be key to creating change in U.S. policy towards Venezuela. arepas

In all, a highly interesting discussion, punctuated by a fun excuse for Martica, left, and me to grab some arepas at Atlanta’s own Arepa Mia. It’s one of only a few, but growing number, of Venezuelan restaurants in the United States.

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!

Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships, Summer 2016

John_Paul_Stevens,_SCOTUS_photo_portraitBeginning this year, the University of Georgia School of Law will award two of its current students Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships of $5,000 each in order to support their summer placements in public interest law. The initiative marks a new partnership between Georgia Law and the John Paul Stevens Fellowship Foundation, which was established by former law clerks of Stevens, who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1975 until his retirement in 2010. His 2013 speech to the Georgia Law community, entitled “Originalism and History,” is web-archived here, and available in the Georgia Law Review here.

Among the Justice’s former clerks are a Georgia Law alumna, Merritt E. McAllister, now a partner at King & Spalding LLP in Atlanta, and two Georgia Law faculty members, Diane Marie Amann, Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives and Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Professor Sonja R. West.

The award of a Justice John Paul Stevens Fellowship recognizes a Georgia Law student’s commitment to public service and potential for excellence throughout his or her legal career.  Deadline to apply is April 4, 2016; interested Georgia Law students should contact Kathleen A. Doty,  doty[at]uga[dot]edu, Associate Director of Global Practice Preparation at the Dean Rusk International Law Center.

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!