Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2009

Abstract

Sometimes you get a chance to work on a project so complex, even you don't come to fully understand its impact until years later. At least that has been the experience for me regarding the opportunity I had to work in Iraq with the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) from February 2004 to January 1, 2006. As I reported in a previous essay, IHRLI, an institute of the DePaul University College of Law headed by Cherif Bassiouni, received a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Higher Education and Development (HEAD) contract to work with three Iraqi law schools.' The contract was initially proposed as a three-year plan to help Iraqi law schools overcome the effects of more than twenty years of economic, physical, and intellectual isolation. The complete project included a program for clinical legal education, curriculum reform, rule of law, and library and educational technology.

All of the goals for the program were extremely ambitious. The situation of the law schools in Iraq really didn't allow for anything smaller in scope. Three law schools were selected-one each from the three major geographic regions of Iraq. The following is a contemporaneous description of the project. It was written about midway through the actual time spent in-country; however, at the time we thought the program was just about to end.

Publication Citation

Documents to the People, Vol. 37, Summer 2009, 19-22.

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