Toby’s blog

I’ll be making some calls tomorrow [correction from “today”] to chat with some prospective transfer students and probably make some offers of admission. Thanks for your patience!

…Stephanie Robinson. You probably thought I was going to say Barack Obama. But there’s a more imminent election to replace Tavis Smiley as commentator on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Stephanie is a lecturer here at Harvard Law School as well as an HLS alumna and the CEO of the Jamestown Project.

Thanks to Professor Ron Sullivan for the heads up on this!

(L-R) María Luisa Romero 3L, Tim Mayhle 3L, Professor James Cavallaro

María Luisa Romero: (19:09)

As her tenure at HLS begins to wind down, 3L María Luisa Romero stopped in to chat with staffer Julia Foresman about her human rights advocacy in Panamanian prisons. In the fall of her 2L year, as a student in Clinical Professor James Cavallaro’s Human Rights Advocacy seminar, María Luisa already had a project on Panama’s prisons in mind. She’d found there had been few international reports on the topic since Noriega’s ouster. During an independent clinical, met with prison system officials and members of the government, including the attorney general.

Last March, Cavallaro, Romero and two other students visited six prisons. María Luisa estimates these facilities hold more than 70 percent of Panama’s prisoners. During her research, she found, among many other abuses, flagrant corruption, overcrowding, and sanitation problems.

In Fall of 2007, María Luisa returned to Panama with Cavallaro returned to meet with other officials from the correctional system. The culmination of her efforts, which included the submission of a report to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, came a few weeks ago during a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

To watch the recording of the hearing on March 7, 2008 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, visit their website. The title of the hearing is “Human Rights Violations in Prisons in Panama.” Please note that the hearing is in Spanish.

So I’m sure many of you have heard of meetup.com. I had, but I thought it was just about politics. Today, however, I was looking for a way to play tennis more often and came upon the Somerville Tennis Meetup Group (Somerville is the next town over from Cambridge). Why am I telling you this? Because I noticed that when I typed 02138 (our zip code at HLS) into the general search window at the “Find a Meetup” link, it listed a ton of activities happening in the near future with groups of people in the Cambridge/Boston area. Now some of them appear to be a little odd, but who am I to judge…

I just thought I’d offer that link up as a way of finding interesting off-campus activities in the area.

Saw this on the home page and didn’t want you to miss it!

I noticed this give and take on recent Supreme Court cases on Slate and since two of the four participants are members of the HLS faculty, I thought you might be interested. Professor Jack Goldsmith is an expert on national security law and teaches constitutional law and other courses. Visiting Professor Walter Dellinger leads one of our Supreme Court Clinicals.

Visit this link for The Supreme Court Breakfast Table.

I get a biweekly e-mail from the Human Rights Program updating me on their latest activities. The most recent one discussed a report the Human Rights Clinic released on prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes in South Africa and HLS student participation in the negotiations to ban cluster munitions. I thought some people out there might like to be on the list, so I asked Mike Jones at HRP to fill me in. He responded:

“Students can sign up for it directly on our Web site…http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/hrp. There’s a box on the left side under events where folks can enter their emails to sign up for our e-newsletter.”

Harvard Law School has a very active Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, and we regularly bring speakers to campus to highlight related issues. Recently, I sat in on an interesting discussion on African asylum hosted by Dr. Wagacha Burton, the co-founder of Mapendo, a privately funded NGO that since 2005 has sought to identify, rescue and protect African refugees who have fallen through the cracks of traditional humanitarian efforts.

According to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is defined as “a person who has fled from and/or cannot return to their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution, including war or civil conflict.” Thus, for over half a century, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has sought to lead and coordinate action to protect refugees and resolve racial, religious, national, social and political conflicts worldwide.

“Today,” Dr. Burton began, “there are over 3 million total African refugees.” Among those he cited as vulnerable refugees are survivors of violence and torture; those individuals with serious threats to their lives in their country of refuge; and women at risk.

A case that has garnered particular attention over the last year is that of the urban refugees of Nairobi, Kenya where Mapendo operates the only healthcare clinic dedicated to the city’s urban refugee population of 185,000. According to Dr. Burton, “Nairobi’s refugees live unseen and forgotten. They are subjected to an abuse of human rights including lack of access to healthcare, increased risks of sexual and gender based violence, child abduction, forced marriage, and arbitrary arrest and detention.”

On the topic of solutions, Edmundson and Dr. Burton outlined the options for UNHCR. “Voluntary repatriation is the best outcome,” said Dr. Burton,” because it reestablishes ethnic communities.” Barring this option, Mapendo works in conjunction with UNHCR to attempt local integration and third country resettlement. Unfortunately, although the United States has implemented a resettlement regime that allows a quota for African refugees the quota is typically not met due to the inability of NGOs to properly mobilize the refugees. To rectify this, Mapendo refers qualified parties to the U.S. Embassies in Africa and has begun collaborating with local NGOs in East and Central Africa to research and identify at-risk populations.

Graduating students vote on the best teacher at Harvard Law School. The winner of the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award this year was Professor Daryl Levinson. I was in attendance for his speech on Class Day and it brought the house down. Visit this link to read more about it and to watch the video clip.

Here’s some food for thought for all of you Law and Economics aficionados out there:

It was during a commencement speech here at Harvard exactly sixty years ago that Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined his ambitious plan to rehabilitate and modernize the economies of Western European friends and allies in the wake of WWII atrocities. It is in much the same spirit that R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Graduate Business School, spoke recently at HLS of a Marshall Plan for Africa “In 1960,” he began, “the average labor productivity in sub-Saharan Africa equaled Asia… there is no reason why the same scheme, based on economic reform, could not also jumpstart business and productivity in Africa.”

British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown first argued for the notion of extending the Marshall Plan to Africa in 2005. “Gordon’s plan focused on the social sector… it was essentially a bigger package of the same old stuff,” said Hubbard. Unlike Gordon’s plan, the original Marshall Plan emphasized the business sector and aimed to restore productivity to local businesses, circulate funds to rebuild commercial infrastructure, implement economic policies to restore the private sector, and distribute the funds evenly around Europe. “It offered something new…on the micro level,” said Hubbard, “There is a difference between the development of social services and the economic reform… charity is not economic development.”

The thrust of Hubbard’s argument is that a Marshall Plan for Africa would by and large replace NGOs with businesses to ignite the economic reforms that would in turn mitigate poverty and humanitarian crisis. “Business leaders have been conspicuously absent from African business talks, which is unfortunate,” Hubbard commented. “For this reason, I feel that business schools are cauldrons for the study of practices and management skills that work… Inventory that best practices in developed countries and import them.”

Hubbard admitted that his plan was not without its controversies, especially when several students questioned the differences of human capital and governance ability that existed in pre-war Europe and Africa and whether or not Africa’s social ills were going to be management problems in and of themselves. “This is your moral responsibility,” insisted Hubbard, “and the antecedent is resoundingly clear.”