Strengthening Rule of Law from the Ground Up

Last Summer, Ale Lynberg, JD ’19, spent two months in Rwanda as a kind of ambassador for the Rule of Law. Clerking for the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Rwanda, she wrote memos on a wide variety of cases and researched such topics as corruption and judicial independence.

She saw the struggles, and occasional ironies, of a country still trying to emerge from the shadow of the 1994 genocide. As part of a series of political reforms, citizens of Rwanda now have wide access to the country’s highest court. The downside is that the court has been flooded with cases.

“That was a big part of what the chief justice was working on,” Lynberg recalls. “How do we reduce that burden without compromising justice?”

Lynberg’s clerkship is just one initiative of Stanford’s Rule of Law Program, which has been deploying Stanford Law students around the globe, aiming to strengthen justice systems in some of the most historically challenging places on Earth.

SLS students are also engaging in legal research into human rights in Cambodia and collaborating with reform-minded academics in Iraqi Kurdistan. And a dozen students studying global poverty spent the spring recess in India examining how corruption affects the lives of the poor.

In December, the ROL’s student-driven Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) was awarded a $3 million U.S. State Department grant to support its work with the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in Kabul on an integrated bachelor of arts and bachelor of laws (BA/LLB) degree program. AUAF is training a new generation of Afghan lawyers and leaders, using textbooks and courses that have been designed and written by SLS students in close collaboration with AUAF faculty. The award was just the latest expression of support for the program from the U.S. government and comes less than two years after a devastating terrorist attack on the AUAF campus in August 2016.

The new State Department money, the third such grant since 2009, is another show of support for the important program in a country still grappling with the aftermath of war and ongoing terrorism. Just this spring, AUAF became the first university accredited by Afghanistan’s higher-education ministry.

For students, the Rule of Law Program, nearing its 20th year, offers an unparalleled experience in comparative law, combining the study of law in countries with vastly different legal systems and traditions with the opportunity to work alongside local lawyers and academics and nongovernmental organizations.

“Many Afghans said,‘We know there is the temptation to leave but please don’t, because the education you provide is a symbol of the type of education that we want our local universities to develop.’”

– Erik Jensen, Director, Rule of Law Program

Along the way, they get the chance to apply their world-class research and writing skills to projects that make a difference. “The model is designed for students to leave a legacy,” says Erik Jensen, professor of the practice of law and director of the Rule of Law Program. “They do not want to wait until after they graduate from law school to do something they believe is meaningful.” Julian Simcock, JD ’13, an attorney in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department, says his experiences as a student co-director of ALEP played a big role in his decision to work in international law and they have continued to inform his work in government.

During the Obama administration, Simcock participated in negotiations to normalize relations with Cuba, analyzing changes in the country’s legal system after Castro came to power. He subsequently advised the Special Envoy’s Office on Sudan and South Sudan and traveled for the South Sudan peace talks, which culminated in a cessation of hostilities agreement in December.

“Our delegation confronts questions on the rule of law all the time,” Simcock says. “If the parties agree to a permanent cease-fire, what’s the best way to ensure accountability? What’s the relationship between a peace agreement and a constitution? What’s the proper role for the United States to play in a conflict abroad? That’s all stuff that we used to grapple with at ALEP.”

SLS has long promoted legal education in the developing world. In the 1950s, Dean Carl Spaeth took a leave of absence from Stanford Law School to serve as director of overseas activities for the Ford Foundation and helped develop rural and industrial assistance programs in India, Pakistan and Burma. Unlike many of his generation, he took the view that Westerners could best help by supporting in-country academics and making sure that training took into account local customs and context.

Today, the Rule of Law Program builds on that legacy, taking its cues from academic institutions and social justice groups on the ground and setting relatively modest objectives.

“We are cautious of having overly broad goals,” says Mehdi Hakimi, executive director of the Rule of Law Program and lecturer in law, citing the unpredictability of events in the developing world. At the same time, he sees education as having the greatest potential for good.

“If you have a justice sector that nobody trusts, hopes for meaningful change are diminished rapidly,” says Hakimi, who was chair of the AUAF law department before joining SLS. “Fixing the mentality and culture, they take time. But it is something worth investing in.

”Working with a nonprofit based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, SLS students are doing comparative legal research into LGBT rights with the hope of getting lawmakers to ease restrictions on same-sex marriage and adoption.

They’ve also contributed to an annotated version of the Cambodia constitution, aimed at opening the eyes of legal educators and practitioners to how the document might be used as a greater force for justice. Cambodia has adopted many democratic reforms since the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, but political rights remain under attack and corruption is considered the worst of any country in Southeast Asia.

“It opens a conversation,” Rolando Garcia Miron, JSM ’13 and a JSD candidate overseeing the students’ work in Cambodia, says of their efforts. “Step by step, there is the chance to create something good.”

Students are drawn to such experiences, with a wide range of perspectives.

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Illustration by Leif Parsons

Before law school, Emily Hawley, JD ’19, spent four years in Jordan working with Syrian refugees. Now, as part of the Rule of Law Program, she is doing research into protections for women under Iraqi national law and Kurdish regional law for a professor at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani.

“I think it is really necessary to approach this kind of work with a lot of humility,” says Hawley, who hopes to resume working in the region after graduation. “But I think education is one of the more powerful ways we can contribute to these important foundations.”

Lynberg used to work at Google, on a team developing products for emerging markets. She pivoted to law after discovering she was more interested in how different countries address such issues as technology and privacy or freedom of expression on the internet. In Rwanda, she gained a new perspective on how countries deal with political speech including criminal penalties for people who deny or minimize the genocide.

“I walked in being a huge proponent of freedom of expression, which I saw as an almost absolute right,” Lynberg says. “But by the time I left, I realized that rights cannot be viewed in isolation and a country’s historical and cultural context must be considered in weighing and balancing fundamental human rights.”

Hyatt Mustefa, JD ’19, originally became interested in the relationship between rule of law, development, and poverty at an early age.

“My parents immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia and I’ve always been fascinated by the seemingly conflicting realities of high growth rates and declining poverty rates that are simultaneously coupled with corruption and authoritarian rule,” Mustefa says.

Now, working on a Rule of Law project with the University of Rwanda School of Law, she is helping to write the first introductory textbook for law students in Rwanda in 20 years. As part of her research, she interviewed a member of parliament who served on the committee that drafted the 2003 constitution—the guiding document of Rwandan society following the genocide.

“I couldn’t help but think often of the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War as well as the constitutional amendments and Jim Crow legal structures that followed,” Mustefa says. “For me, this has inspired a larger question of how deeply divided communities can come together in healthy and productive ways after a traumatic onslaught of multifaceted and systemic violence.”

At AUAF, less than two years after a terror attack took 14 lives, including that of Naqib Ahmad Khpulwak, a beloved former ALEP research fellow, everyone in the program seems recommitted to its future.

“We learned when the university was attacked how much it meant to Afghans,” Jensen says. “Many Afghans said, ‘We know there is the temptation to leave but please don’t, because the education you provide is a symbol of the type of education that we want our local universities to develop.’”

Samira Abrar moved to the United States after the attack and finished her degree online from Los Angeles, using Skype to take part in her civil procedure class. The first woman to head the AUAF student government association, she was also a driving force behind the AUAF moot court team.

“AUAF is really, really an asset to all the students, helping them get empowered,” Abrar says. She is now working as a production associate for a nonprofit that makes documentaries about Israeli-Palestinian peace-makers, and she is preparing to take the LSAT with an eye on becoming a human rights attorney.

There are signs that AUAF, with just a few dozen law students, is starting to have an outsized influence in Afghanistan.

Heads of other law schools, which have been marked by top-down instruction and rote memorization, are seeking to collaborate with AUAF, where the focus has been on developing critical thinking skills, using case studies and role-playing.

There’s growing demand for the dozen or so textbooks on Afghan law that SLS students have authored. According to Hakimi, the Supreme Court of Afghanistan has uploaded an ALEP text on criminal law, and others are being used by research groups and other organizations.

AUAF graduates are serving in important positions in the public and private sphere, often overcoming the ravages of war and other adversity.

Abdul Naser Rahmani, one of 11 children, grew up on the streets of Herat after his mother died. For a time, he worked in a brick factory. Eventually, he attended religious schools and, subsequently, he became a scholar of Islamic law and a mullah. A friend suggested Rahmani give AUAF a try.

This May, Rahmani, AUAF Class of 2017 valedictorian, received his Master of Laws degree at the University of Notre Dame School of Law in South Bend, Indiana. His thesis is an examination of peaceful dispute resolution in Afghanistan under local custom and Islamic law.

Rahmani, who is now 38, plans to return home and have a career in legal academia and government. “It has been an enlightenment,” he says of his studies.

Such projects “draw on the tremendous human capacity of our students to improve the quality of legal education in developing countries,” says Jensen, noting that the Rule of Law Program remains infused with the humility and local sensibilities that former Dean Spaeth evoked over 60 years ago. “We are grooming a group of students who will be future leaders and who are trying to imagine a different future for their countries.”