A Student Perspective on the Summer Abroad Program
By Sundari Wind
UCLA 2004
REPRINT FROM THE DOCKET
UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW
NOVEMBER 2002, PAGE 3
After a five-and-a-half week internship with the Santa Monica Bay Keeper, a non-profit environmental organization concerned with ocean water quality, I did a five-week study abroad program in Europe. (The ABA has a list of study abroad programs that are ABA approved and listed by country.) It was an amazing program through The Dickinson School of Law of The Pennsylvania State University. For starters, the program traveled to six different countries, gave guided tours upon arrival in every city, and visited several international courts. In each city we had amazing guest speakers as well as classes.
I flew into Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and spent a few days in the Hague area to get over jetlag before the program started. The first night there I walked to the beach and watched the sun set, huge and red into the North Sea at 10:30 at night. The school program started with a guided tour of Amsterdam, followed by free time there (Yes, Amsterdam’s everything you heard it is!). Then we went to the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice. At the ICJ our speakers were Judge Thomas Buergenthal, Member of the ICJ, and Arthur Werteveen, Secretary of the ICJ. They spoke about the organization and work of the ICJ, as well as their experiences there, and we were able to talk with them at length.
Also in the Netherlands, we visited The Hague, home of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and also the tribunals for the war crimes in Rwanda. We attended an open session of trial for one of Slobodan Milosevics’s top generals. It was intense. There were three security checkpoints, we had to give our passports, and even the guard who gave us the translator headphones had a gun. The proceedings were, just as we had seen on CNN, behind floor-to-ceiling glass strong enough to withstand a rocket-launched grenade. Behind the glass, three judges sat in the center, the attorneys sat before the judges on each side of them, translators in smoked-glass booths lined the walls along both sides of the room, and the defendant sat to the left with an armed guard on each side of him. Armed guards stood at the doors, and more armed guards escorted witnesses to the stand and stood beside them while they testified. The day we were there, a top British Army officer testified about being the first to arrive in the village after it was destroyed. As we observed, I switched through the channels on my headset and listened to the proceedings in six different languages. It was awesome to get a sense of the complexities of an international court. For example, at one point an attorney looked at the monitor of one of the court reporters and paused the proceedings to correct her misinterpretation of “a tax” on a village as opposed to “attacks” on a village. I started to understand the ramifications of even interpreting the trials into the different languages. At the end of the day, the president of the tribunal court talked with us (in French through an interpreter) and answered all of our questions.
Next, we went to Brussels, Belgium, and visited the Council of European Union headquarters. There, our speakers were Christina George and Anna Lo Monaco, both attorneys for the Council, which governs the business of the European Community. They lectured about international practice before the European Court of Justice, European company law, and the employee’s role in the administration of a European company. Lectures were held in huge oval conference rooms with the translators’ booths lining the walls and headphones and microphones at every seat. Very formal.
Then we went to Luxembourg and visited the European Court of Justice. We were briefed by a referendaire (basically a clerk) to Judge David Edwards about a case that we were able to attend. The trial was before a panel of five judges in red robes, and it was mostly in German, so headsets were a must. Then two referendaires and Judge Edwards, of the ECJ, spoke to us about the work and organization of the ECJ.
Our next city was Strasbourg, France, where we stayed for two weeks. Our classes were at the European Court of Human Rights, across the street from the Commission of the EU. Distinguished lecturers from the ECHR talked with us about the functions of the court, human rights issues and the law. Also in Strasbourg, Chief Justice Rehnquist taught a seminar on “The Supreme Court in United States History” (basically a very contextualized Con Law class). We had him for two weeks and he remembered every single student’s name after hearing it only once. He was more aged and a bit less intimidating than I expected. We had a big dinner with him one night, and when the restaurant got hot and smoke filled I went outside for fresh air. There was the Chief Justice just standing on the patio. He and I stood there and chatted for about 15 minutes – about France, where I should go in Paris that weekend, what he was going to do for the weekend, etc. It was casual, not at all like he was head of one of the three branches of our government – a job that only 16 people have had in the history of our country. The next morning (the 4th of July!) he signed my book (we read two of his books for the class), and he remembered me from the night before and talked to me like we were old friends. Didn’t expect that when I signed up for law school!
Then we went to Vienna, Austria where we had too many amazing lecturers to list here. Many of the lecturers represented different EU organizations, like the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Our classes were at the Juridicum, Vienna’s law school, where we were joined by some Austrian law students. (Vienna is awesome and Austrians really like to party!)
Then, we flew into London and spent the rest of the program in Oxford. I don’t even know where to start with that, except to say it was way cooler than I had ever expected, and a really beautiful city. There are 36 colleges that make up Oxford University, and one of them is called Oxford College, but it’s actually less prestigious than some of the others. Every college is within walking distance of the others and each has its own pub, and the college we stayed in, St. Edmunds, was the only one with its own cemetery. Richard J. Goldstone, our last lecturer, was one of the smartest, most amazing speakers I’ve ever seen. He is a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the former Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the recipient of the International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association (1994). He lectured about law, culture, international politics, and the United States’ relationship to other countries. I’m not doing him justice here, but trust me – I was mesmerized.
Notice so far that I’ve written mostly about the school program. Though we did have classes in every city, no one spent the whole night in the hotel reading, and we all managed to pass the classes. I’ll just say that one of the greatest things about a traveling program is that I got to spend my afternoons and nights in different cities, and weekends in different countries. I spent weekends in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Paris, Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, miscellaneous German towns, etc. I saw the windmills of Holland; ate real Belgian waffles; met a New Zealander who made Luxembourg one of my favorite cities in Europe; went to Hitler’s Eagle’s nest in Salzburg; drove a new Porsche 911 turbo through the Bavarian Alps (love those German guys!); saw Cirque De Soleil in Vienna; and saw a play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at an outdoor theatre in Oxford. And that’s not even the half of it. My point is that there is one thing I know for certain: I’ll never, ever wish I had spent my summer in LA, worn a suit and commuted downtown to an office.
I spent the last three weeks of summer traveling around Europe: Ireland, Germany, Austria . . . If you’ve done the math through my story you’ll notice we’ve covered thirteen-and-a-half weeks. Just before I left for Europe I also moved, and then subleased while I was gone. Jet-lagged, with everything I owned in a box, and just a few days to go buy my books, I looked toward the second year. Then, the morning after I returned home to LA, my best friend died. That’s the only thing that made me wish I had scheduled in a break. But no one saw that coming. Some things we can’t plan for, and that’s why we should make every day count. Make your 14 weeks count. Go do the things you really want to so that you can find out what you actually want to end up doing. Last summer I got a real sense for non-profit work, I was able to actually observe international law, and now I know that I need to spend at least a few weeks next summer . . . in New Zealand.
