Did you hear world?! I FINISHED MY LAST DAY OF CLASS AS A 1L TODAY! In two short weeks (after finals are finished), I will walk off of the Seattle U campus as a suave, confident 2L. Hooray!
There’s a happy dance building inside, just waiting for an audience (Nick). It will be unleashed on him as soon as he gets home.
Life has been a little law-focused lately, but what can I say? Finals are approaching and I don’t think about much else. So, without further ado, I present a tribute to Civil Procedure. (This will probably only make sense to a small fraction of this site’s readers.)
Earlier this semester, I worked my tail off researching asylum law as it pertains to female genital mutilation. My two issues were whether an applicant could qualify for a grant of asylum under a “humanitarian exception” (i.e. her circumstances were so bad that no matter what kind of persecution she feared or didn’t fear in her home country there was no way we should send her back) or under the Convention Against Torture (sort of like the humanitarian exception, but sanctioned by the UN and for circumstances even worse than might qualify under the humanitarian exception).
The law is unsettled in this area, but I predicted that the client for this particular application would qualify under the humanitarian exception. And wouldn’t you know it? The BIA agreed with me today! Yea!
The whole big memo I wrote is available here, if you have insatiable curiosity about the issue.
Note: The following article about my experiences in New Orleans was published in the Prolific Reporter, Seattle University School of Law’s weekly student newspaper.
“How bad could it be two and a half years later?”
“Is it really worthwhile to rebuild at this point?”
“Aren’t the people in FEMA trailers just living off the Federal Government tit?”
These questions and more echoed through Dixon Hall at Tulane University on Sunday night. More than 400 law students from around the country – including 14 1Ls from Seattle University – were airing the doubts we’d heard after announcing our intention to donate our spring break to helping the residents of New Orleans. Admittedly, some of the questions were doubts I harbored, too.
Thankfully, our experiences over the next six days completely dispelled these myths.
Can you believe it?! It’s snowing and STICKING TO THE GROUND (!) in mid-April! Who’d a thunk?