A Polish Week: When History Isn't History

You can't spend time in Poland without running into WWII. 

Being historically minded, and working (at the time) amongst the institutional legacy of the Nuremberg Trials, I knew I knew everything about WWII when we set off for Poland. I was wrong.

If you go to Krakow, you have to go to Auschwitz. Jeff and I were looking forward to this field trip like an overdue visit to the dentist. It's not easy to get to, and the non-discretionary tour exceeds three hours. That's three hours of depressing statistics, more depressing anecdotes, and filing silently through depressing ruins in the hot August sun. Fun.

Three hours have never passed so quickly. (Jeff will attest.) For one thing, I never realized how much of our cultural understanding of the Holocaust is based specifically on Auschwitz: from Arbeit Macht Frei to the use of tattoos to identify prisoners (which our tour guide insisted only happened here).  

But what I really hadn't understood, and the reason I am grateful I went to Auschwitz, was the magnitude of Birkenau, the death camp next door. Birkenau is an atomic wasteland. I swear there are still no birds there, nothing but long grass and weeds covering what little remains of row after row after row of bunk houses. This is where the train tracks to nowhere enter through the red brick prison gates and stretch a mile down the "sorting platform" to the crematoriums. (One of the smartest things the Nazis ever did was to blow up the gas chambers of Birkenau. I couldn't truly picture what had happened there when all I had to look at was a caved-in pile of rubble.)

But more or less, this was all stuff I already knew. What I didn't know was the story of Warsaw. 

Why Not? Law as an Undergrad Degree

I run into some problems here in The Hague.  My seven years of higher education just get no respect.  In most of the world, law is an undergraduate degree; those serious about, say, international law will then spend a year getting a subject-specific Master's degree (LLM).  Those really serious will get a PhD - but this isn't like the six to eight years it takes to get a humanities PhD in the U.S.  And then there are those who don't even have a undergrad law degree, but only a one-year LLM.

Many a time I have tried to explained to 23-year-old colleagues that yes, I do have an advanced law degree.  While this is slightly annoying at a personal level, it makes me wonder, what if we didn't stick with the JD model back in the States?

Consider: a state university with a law school (take the University of Oregon) could negotiate with the state bar association (take Oregon's) to allow students from an undergraduate law program to sit for the bar (most states require you to have a degree from an ABA-accredited law school first).  U of O could then start a four-year undergraduate law degree program, perhaps with a strongly recommended fifth-year LLM (Master's degree) component.

Your freshman year of college would be composed of traditional liberal arts classes.  Sophomore year, in addition to taking any remaining general education requirements, you also take courses on legal reasoning and the theoretical underpinnings of law - something that is generally missing from U.S. legal education.  Junior and senior year you take full-on law courses, many of them at the university's law school.  If you complete the program, you are automatically admitted into the law school's LLM program in a specific area of law that is widely practiced in the state.  In Oregon, this might be energy or environmental law, or general business or criminal law.  

Consider further: Some law schools have already floated the idea of cutting out the third year.  Others have effectively done so by requiring a year's worth of externships.  Super-nerds like me, who just can't get enough of school (or are indecisive), could still get a liberal arts college degree and a separate JD.  Those able and willing to go the undergraduate route, however, would save considerable tuition costs - as well as the opportunity and career development cost of two or three years of productive employment in lieu of law school.  Which also means that fewer lawyers would feel trapped in jobs they really didn't like just because they have law school loans to pay off (or to justify how much their parents spent on their tuition).  And if after five years of your BA and LLM studies, you still want more, you could pursue a SJD, like a PhD of law - currently so rare a degree, most people don't know it exists.

Yes, employers would have to be willing to hire these B.A. lawyers.  But the lower cost of these lawyers (justified by their smaller investment in tuition) would be a real incentive.  Indeed, having a pool of B.A. lawyers could increase access to justice for lower income families, small businesses, and non-profit organizations.  The state and local governments could get in on the action, too.  Really, I only see upsides - and I think it's a model that could be feasibly implemented by rolling it out on a state-by-state basis. 

You can thank me later.

The Long Arm of Justice

Having lived in Boston for eight years, I was appropriately titillated by the recent capture of Whitey Bulger.  But I was even more titillated by the capture, the week before, of Ratko Mladic, alleged mastermind of much mayhem in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Consider: Whitey was wanted for 19 murders; Ratko was wanted for more than 7,000 murders in Srebrenica alone.  Damn.

In fact, there's been so many headlines like these in recent weeks that even I have overlooked some of them.  In the spirit of Jeff's recent post about The Hague's lack of brand clarity, and for your use during cocktail parties and high-end water cooler debates, I present a cheat sheet on the international criminal courts in The Hague - and which recent headlines go with which:

On the Roman Basilica

I have to admit: I was under-impressed by the Coliseum. After a couple hours, most of the ruins of the Forum and Palantine Hill were indistinguishable to me. An imaginative person, I nevertheless am unable to imagine what a Roman city would have looked like in its heyday.

But the Basilica of Constantine - that stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it's because I had never heard of it, and thus did not know what to expect. And it would be pretty hard to describe it in any way that would make anyone want to go see it (unlike, say, the Coliseum).

Some Thoughts on Liberation Day...

I just happened to be reading a law review article today about Heinrich Boere, a Dutch Nazi sympathizer who carried out retaliation killings on behalf of the occupation forces -- that is, he covertly assassinated innocent Dutch civilians in retaliation for attacks by the resistance movement.

The idea is haunting (though I understand from the article it was not that unusual during WWII): After an attack by the resistance, the word would come down that a certain number of reprisal killings were required. But the local authority would have to decide who, and usually did so randomly. From the article:

For every victim of the resistance movement up to three Dutch citizens were to be shot.... Assassinations were performed either in the early morning or late in the evening. SD officers would usually accompany the assassins. These were disguised in civilian clothes, equipped with false identity cards and drove cars with false number plates. They called on their victims at home. If they did not encounter the victim, the assassination was abandoned and the killers proceeded to the next address on the list. If they encountered the victim, they would verify the victims' identity, shoot at point blank range and disappear.

Photo Ops in Delft

Feeling restless after a week in the Hague, we ventured this Sunday to Delft -- all of a twenty minute tram ride away. Indeed, Delft is so close to -- and so much prettier than -- the Hague, Rick Steves recommends that tourists camp out in Delft and only venture into the Hague for short periods of time.

To be honest, Delft's postcard-perfect beauty was rather lost on me: after only a week in the Netherlands, I might already be canal'd out. But I did get the obligatory photo with Hugo Grotius, father of international law:

Other famous Delftians include Vermeer, who spent his whole life in Delft (though none of his paintings currently reside there), and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope and discovered bacteria. Coincidentally, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born the same year, but Leeuwenhoek lived more than twice as long - which just goes to show, we should all be scientists (or at least, driven by our curiousity).

Another View of Delft, and Grotius