Summer in the Hague
2L Ayalon Eliach recently e-mailed me about his experience this summer at the Hague:
Prior to arriving at HLS, I spent two years living, working, and traveling abroad. Whether it was trying to understand how tax treaties between the United States and South Korea affected my earnings in Seoul, taking advantage of the easy access to travel and work visas that I enjoyed as an American, or seeing pictures of President Bush on newspaper covers in almost every country I visited, my experiences overseas piqued my interest in international law and heightened my curiosity about the ways in which the United States’ interests are affected by and pursued through international legal institutions.
When I got to HLS, I began thinking about my 1L summer very early on. I knew the different elements of what I was looking for but wasn’t sure how to combine them. I wanted to learn more about international law, better understand America’s role in the international legal order, and contribute what I could to my country. After speaking to some 1L friends and upper-classmen, it became pretty clear that working for the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser presented the perfect opportunity to combine those interests.
I quickly learned that the Office of the Legal Adviser’s summer internship is only open to law students who have completed their 2L year. Luckily, OPIA’s Job Search Database contains profiles of internship opportunities impossible to find anywhere else on the Internet. A quick search for “U.S. Embassy” led me to an evaluation of an internship with the State Department’s Office of the Legal Counselor in The Hague. The evaluation was extremely enthusiastic and contained contact information for a State Department attorney who worked in the office. I emailed her and although she had returned to Washington, she was able to put me in contact with the current Legal Counselor who explained the application process to me.
The internship was everything that I had hoped for and more. I had the opportunity to directly work for and learn from two brilliant attorneys from the Office of the Legal Adviser stationed in The Hague. I attended meetings with other states’ legal representatives, trials of alleged war criminals, and readings of legal decisions that impacted countries’ sovereignties and borders. Being in the world’s capital of international law gave me unparalleled exposure to the issues I was interested in, and researching and writing about those issues deepened my understanding of them. By the end of the summer, I had done substantive work related to the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and other legal institutions.
The internship brought my 1L Public International Law class to life and enabled me to get out of my 1L summer everything that I had hoped for and more.
