In 2018, ten Harvard Law School students were selected as Cravath International Fellows. During Winter Term, they traveled to nine countries to pursue clinical placements or independent research with an international, transnational, or comparative law focus. Four of these students describe their experiences.
At HLS, Jafarnia became deeply involved in work arising from the executive orders banning travelers from Muslim countries from entering the U.S., gathering a group of classmates to protest at Logan Airport, returning the next week to assist affected travelers and working with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic on its amicus briefs to the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court. Her Winter Term clinical in Jordan afforded her an opportunity to explore the full effects of the ban, well before the people affected try to enter the U.S. For the two years before the ban, “the U.S. was taking in significantly more refugees than any other place in the world. At the end of the day, even though many more spots have opened up in other countries, it’s just not enough to make up for the decrease in U.S. spots,” she explains.
Traveling to Jordan gave Jafarnia a chance to address these issues from a new comparative lens. “Each country presents a unique set of challenges for refugees,” she notes; Jordan hosts a significant number of refugees, but does not offer employment for them, and is almost entirely landlocked, which makes it more difficult for refugees to leave.
“My hope for the future is to start my own organization, giving refugees legal assistance but also empowering refugees with legal backgrounds to be doing this work themselves,” she explains. “I think countries have to work significantly harder at giving refugees work opportunities. Once you let people in, they need to be given the opportunity to create a life for themselves. There’s an image of people who have been displaced as burdens on the system, when in fact they’re not given the opportunity to be self-sustaining.” Her Winter Term work in Jordan has confirmed for her that this is a change that has to happen very soon.
One of the laws he looked at — the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) — provided some insight into how Canada has addressed this contentious and polarizing issue. “PIPEDA’s origin story is, in my view, uniquely Canadian,” he explains; “it’s one of compromise and consensus.” The Canadian Standards Association, a group responsible for setting national standards, created a set of voluntary principles governing the use of personal information by convening the relevant stakeholders, including industry and civil rights organizations. Despite some dissatisfaction, they achieved consensus. Five years later, the Canadian government incorporated the principles directly into law.
James Toomey ’19 traveled to Zurich, Switzerland to conduct independent research on the regulation of biological and genetic technologies under the Swiss constitution. His project drew on a longstanding interest in the intersection of bioethics and the law, a subject that he explored in depth when he took a class on reproductive technology and genetics and a workshop on health law and biotechnology with Professor Glenn Cohen ’03.
Two articles of the current Swiss constitution Toomey explains, regulate genetic and reproductive technologies with reference to the protection of “human dignity” and, more expansively, “the dignity of living beings,” and the constitution and subsequent regulation include specific and particularly restrictive prohibitions on many kinds of reproductive technology and genetic research and medicine. “The concept is very much tied to the value of nature, and the relationship of the human species to what is naturally occurring, and that there’s an inherent moral value to human restraint in this area, to human humility,” Toomey explains. In practical terms, the provisions have a real effect on the Swiss economy (creating a restrictive regime for plant science and genetic engineering, and raising the cost of food) and on the lives of its citizens (for example, limiting access to in vitro fertilization to heterosexual married couples who can prove infertility, and creating barriers to medical research).
During his three-week trip, Toomey conducted extensive interviews with a wide range of actors, including plant scientists, law professors, advocates for animal welfare and against genetically-modified food, and government officials responsible for advising on environmental issues and assessing the safety and permissibility of gene technologies. Although the scientists, ethicists, lawyers and government officials he met were divided on the implications of these constitutional provisions, there was a consensus that dignity encompasses more than the rights and needs of adult human beings.
In addition to giving him his first exposure to a civil law regime, the project sharpened his skills in interviewing people with a wide range of opinions, “just trying to understand their views rather debating them.” He expects to do a judicial clerkship after law school, and hopes to work as a federal prosecutor; in the meantime, he’s looking forward to taking courses in bioethics during his time at HLS.
Alexis Wansac ’19 spent Winter Term in Germany, pursuing independent research on competency for trial standards as they relate to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. A history and political science major in college, Wansac has explored her interest in criminal law at HLS and hopes to work in an international court. “I knew that if I wanted to work in the International Criminal Court someday I’d need more exposure to the civil law system and the inquisitorial system as opposed to a purely adversarial system,” she notes. In American criminal courts, “we go head to head, lawyer vs. lawyer, with the lawyers performing in front of a jury, and the judge as an impartial observer”; the inquisitorial system, on the other hand, “puts the judge in charge of fact-finding – with judges often questioning the lawyers and the witnesses.” Because international courts involve so many different countries, they draw on both approaches.
In Germany, Wansac met with the head of the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, a task force charged with searching for the perpetrators of crimes committed during the Second World War, and with a judge who recommended the prosecution of several war criminals, including John Demjanjuk, a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp who was deported from the U.S. in 2009 to stand trial in Germany, over heavy objections related to his frail health.
Her preliminary conclusion is that the process for assessing competency doesn’t function all that differently in Germany than it does in the U.S. Like in the U.S., competency is assessed before, during, and after a trial, with the German system focusing on competency at three stages: “competency for interrogation, competency for trial, and competency to serve a prison sentence, with a defendant’s competency able to change at any time,” she explained. The German system is, however, notable in taking the defendants’ health issues into account; Demjanjuk, for example, was deemed competent to stand trial, though his participation in court was limited to two 45-minute sessions per day.
Students share photos from their travels.
During the 2018 Winter Term, 58 HLS students traveled to 29 countries conducting research for writing projects or undertaking independent clinicals, with support from the Winter Term International Travel Grant Program, which includes the Cravath International Fellowships, the Lee and Li Foundation Grants, the Reginald F. Lewis Internships, the Mead Cross Cultural Stipends, the Andrew B. Steinberg Scholarships, and the Human Rights Program Grants.