RSS FeedMy Fourth Year of Law School
From the October 2009 issue of Amicus Curiae
Many law students find law school to be so painful that few can understand or relate when I say I actually enjoy the ordeal. They would probably understand even less if I told them that I enjoy it so much that I actually subjected myself to an extra semester of it voluntarily, and not for an LLM.
This is the story of my 2L summer.
I had the opportunity to work for a local law firm during my first year and through my first summer. I had a pleasant enough experience, but I learned all that I could as a law student in that context. For my next summer I decided to do something different.
Most of my time this summer was dedicated to consulting and writing projects. My work projects took me to several locations, including Calgary and B.C. While on the West Coast, I also managed to catch a federal political convention.
Some of my friends outside of law already joke that I do law school on the side. I figured I could probably pick up some legal experience this summer while I was running around. I checked out some summer law abroad programs, and registered for ABA-approved courses at UofT, Bar Ilan in Israel, and Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in Mexico.
Before you get any smart ideas, keep in mind that Western doesn’t accept summer transfer credits, even though many other Canadian law schools do. I’m not saying that they should, but if they did I would have graduated before my January term even began. Yes, it was a pretty intense summer.
The trip to Israel had some personal reasons behind it, in addition to my other activities. During my last trip there about 10 years ago I stayed in (primarily Arab) East Jerusalem and the Territories. I enjoyed a rather privileged lifestyle in the primarily Jewish West Jerusalem, staying in Golan resorts overlooking the Galilee, driving through the Negev desert, floating
in the Dead Sea, and swimming on the beaches of Tel Aviv. The tensions within a very complicated country were highlighted with a visit to the assassination site of Yitzak Rabin.
My last summer destination was Mexico. After an unexpected stop in Monterrey when someone decided to have a baby mid-flight, I arrived at my destination in Guadalajara. I soaked up a lot of local culture during my stay including assorted local crafts, Mexican ballet (sans any sign of tutus), Lucha Libra wrestling, and horseback riding along Lake Chapala.
But it seems that politics and law is inescapable no matter where you go. Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, and President Calderon were in town for the North American Leaders’ Summit. Calderon was even staying a few doors down from me at my five-star hotel. One of the major issues on the agenda for them was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was becoming increasingly contentious to citizens of all countries during the current economic turbulence.
So what exactly did I study while I was running around the world? Most law abroad programs focus on international legal issues, for obvious reasons, so there were courses on the International Criminal Court, environmental law, international economics and NAFTA, cyberspace law and human rights. But I also got some specialized training in Jewish law, holocaust law, and national security issues that I probably would not get anywhere else.
Some of the faculty I studied with included world-renowned rabbis, someone who worked on the Rome Statute through an NGO, and even the infamous Kenneth Starr from the Clinton-Lewinsky case. Starr held a special session to discuss his role in Proposition 8, the same-sex bill that was shot down in California last year.
There is one key lesson unrelated to my summer courses that I would like to impart and share with others. In the summer of your second year you will typically be applying for your articling position. I was extremely fortunate that it worked out for me, but I would not recommend taking your interview call on a Tel Aviv beach, actually doing the interview on a Mexican cell phone, and skipping the law firm reception entirely to tour a Spanish cathedral.
You’ll have a hard time making an impression and competing with candidates who actually bothered to be in the country to interview in person.
And no matter how many excuses you make, or how many times you show them this article, they’re just not going to buy that someone voluntarily subjected themselves to additional law school that they won’t get credit for.
A Tale of Two War Criminals: Bush and Clinton do Toronto
Reproduced with permission of the author.
[1]When you accuse anyone of war crimes, you’d better be sure you have the evidence to back it up; such an accusation is the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded shopping mall.
It’s a serious charge, something that sits heavily on our psyche as fragile human beings who generally tend to disbelieve that any one could be capable of committing crimes against humanity, especially if they have elected him president.
Perhaps that’s why such a presidential event as a “conversation” between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton happened in Toronto, Canada on May 29, 2009 — the event was billed as a “conversation,” [2] maybe because the terms “meeting of the minds” or “great intellectual debate” would embarrass one of the two parties involved?).
The two men got a standing ovation from a packed audience that paid from $200 to over $2,000 a ticket at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Yes, that’s right, a standing ovation from the crowd inside the Convention Centre. And both Presidents got paid for their time. While no one is telling how much each ex-President made off the 90 minute conversation, Bush reportedly received (US) $160,000 for his last appearance in Canada, in Calgary Alberta in March 2009. Clinton can charge up to (US) $350,000 per speaking engagement. Good work if you can get it.
But ask the 500 or so protesters across the street from the Convention Centre, organized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War [3], and the only standing up the presidents got were erect middle fingers. It was this side third and uninvited side of the conversation that chanted slogans such as “Bush and Clinton, war criminals: shame on you!”
Here are a few of the numerous examples of war crimes committed by each of the two men.
Bush as a war criminal
Bush is accused of numerous war crimes, resulting from him ignoring his own constitution’s “supremacy clause,” Article II, section 4, and the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441).
Regarding the United States’ War Crimes Acts, author Mike Ferner from Veterans for Peace [4], writes:
“To give just a snapshot of how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441 which defines a war crime as ‘… a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party …’ The guilty can be ‘… fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.’”
Not to mention important international treaties and conventions such as the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. Breaches of these international treaties and conventions amounting to war crimes are too numerous to mention here (though they are listed at the website War Criminals Out [5], which has lists of charges and broken resolutions.)
The invasion of Iraq is cited as a prime example of Bush’s war crimes, where activists insist Bush should be charged under the UN Resolution 3314, Article 5 (codified from the principles of Nuremberg concerning “Wars of Aggression,” [6] which cites as an historical example Hitler’s invasion of Poland) for committing a “crime against peace.” The invasion of Iraq is thus considered a war crime and a crime against humanity, which is spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions [7].
In Iraq alone, Ferner points out that Bush is responsible for, among other things, “illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing 4 million more in Iraq alone.”
Now, we’re talking big crimes here, a big fire someone should point out to the general public.
Clinton as a war criminal
While Clinton’s presidency might enjoy a different reputation (think blue dress), there’s a case to be made regarding his culpability in committing war crimes. He was not the focus of the demo, but I don’t think he should get a free pass. Again, using the same international conventions and treaties listed above, there’s a list of actions to consider in regards to charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Clinton imposed, through the UN Security Council, sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003, which had a devastating effect on the Iraqi population. The UN, in 1999, reported [8] more that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of the sanctions, disproportionately among children.
On June 26, 1993, the Clinton administration bombed Baghdad [9] in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate former President George Bush, Sr.
Clinton’s administration and NATO conducted the bombing campaign of Bosnia from March 22 to June 11, 1999 without UN Security Council approval, against the rules of the Geneva Conventions [10].
Again, big fire here! Not only should Bush and Clinton’s actions translate into war crimes charges, but their disregard for not only American law but also international treaties and conventions undermines the rule of international law and undermines the consensus of the international community.
And we’re not even talking torture charges against Bush regarding his country’s treatment of foreign nationals at military and CIA run prisons, military or rendition sites around the world, an obvious breach [11] of the Geneva Conventions. Reports from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay alone might be enough to prosecute Bush and win convictions.
These reasons alone were enough to compel the group Lawyers Against The War [12] to issue this statement [13] to the RCMP on March 12, 2009, asking that Bush be denied entry into Canada under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (section 35(1)(a)), because Bush is a war criminal (Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act (CAHWC)).
War crimes in World Court
The latest rumour regarding actually holding Bush and his administration accountable for war crimes comes from Spain, where Harper’s reports [14] that the Spanish press El País and Público state,
“the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo.”
This could be the first step of bringing the Commander and Chief himself before an international court if the lawyers claim they were just following orders.
Is prosecuting the leaders enough?
While I am certainly not against using international criminal courts to prosecute political leaders with war crimes, I believe their function and scope to be too limiting to bring about real justice to victims of crimes against humanity. The problem with any war crimes court stems from the fact that, as prosecution goes, the international community at best gets to nail one of two ringleaders with convictions but leaves the functioning war machine or war bureaucracy untouched, the unknown number of faceless bureaucrats and military personnel untouched.
While we get a vicarious sense of justice because we got the top brass, those big arrests give the media permission to declare justice complete and us permission to move on to the next conflict of the day. And by “us,” I mostly mean the Western world, as if prosecuting international, political criminals has become a judicial white man’s burden.
This assumed distance can also amount to a coolly calculated mood of international NIMBY and moral superiority, where one nation can quickly vilify another by pointing out the atrocities committed in that country while claiming such crimes could never occur in their own.
It also assumes a stance of culpability after the fact. Regarding Iraq, the American public needs to look inwards to whether domestically they did enough to prevent the events of Iraq from occurring in the first place.
But can we as Canadians sit so smugly with the notion that we did not invade Iraq, or that it was the progressive Left that kept Canada out of Iraq and therefore we have clean hands and the permission to look the other way. Can we point to Bush and Clinton, two American presidents, and declare their country the new international fixture of Evil while in contrast considering ourselves the good guys?
Instead of sitting on our presumed laurels and pointing to our deified notion of peacekeeping, perhaps we should be more aware of our own actions, non-actions and culpability in global and domestic affairs. Everything from Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka to the treatment of our aboriginal citizens.
If Americans need to look inward to understand their own heart of darkness, then we must demand that we as Canadians do the same.
