Day to Oppose the Use of Child Soldiers

redhandday_goma_08Today, February 12, marks the eighth anniversary of the entry into force of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict.  As IntLawGrrls points out, the U.S. is a party to the protocol (even though it remains one of the only two countries in the world  that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child itself).

Non-governmental organizations that work to end the phenomenon of child soldiers call the day “Red Hand Day”, and the photo above shows activities in Goma, in Congo DR, marking Red Hand Day in 2008.

An open debate on children and armed conflict in the Security Council last April raised interesting issues.  Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Secretary General’s Special Representative for the issue of children and armed conflict emphasized that the abuse and exploitation of children during armed conflict goes far beyond their recruitment as fighters:

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Langdell’s Curse and Transactional Lawyers

langdell_portrait_vinton_03-150x150In a prior post, I criticized law schools’ heavy reliance on the case-method as a way to prepare lawyers for practice. As I argued in that post, the case method, which primarily teaches students the law through an analysis of the legal reasoning in appellate cases while ignoring most of the factual context for those cases, leads law students to think more like judges and judicial clerks than practicing lawyers.

Still, being able to think like a judge is helpful to some degree to a litigator, for it enables her to place herself in the shoes of her potential audience — the judge – to identify her strongest (and weakest) arguments. Moreover, learning the law through the case method, even absent much of the factual context giving rise to the case, gives students some exposure to what a lawsuit is, who the different parties to a lawsuit are, and how to read and understand the procedural posture of a case. It also helps students to develop legal reasoning skills in the context of a legal problem arising due to existing facts and circumstances. The procedural and evidentiary aspects of litigation are further explored and reinforced through courses on civil procedure and evidence, which are mandatory at many law schools. 

But thinking like a judge is nearly irrelevant to a transactional attorney.

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The Legacy of the Little Rock Crucible

little rock 9“That crucible moment” – that’s a phrase Ernest Green used to describe the period when he and eight other African American students enrolled in and attended Little Rock Center High School in 1957. It took the president of the United States and 10,000 soldiers to help them get in the door in deeply segregationist Arkansas. But more than anything, their success took the determination and self-control that the nine showed against almost overwhelming opposition and hate. The events of that fall became a huge landmark in the fight to end official segregation. 

I didn’t expect to be as moved as I was when six of the nine took the stage at the Varsity Theater this week to receive Marquette’s highest honor, the Pere Marquette Discovery Award, from Father Robert Wild, S.J., the university’s president. 

Maybe it was because I was just barely old enough at the time – I was seven – to have the television images from Little Rock permanently planted in my mind. And here they were, in person. 

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