Napping in the ICJ

Today’s guest lecturer decided to give us a break and I was ecstatic! As you can see, breaks mean a lot to me. Between classes we had our first site visit of the program. We were only told that we were sitting in on a court session of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). What they neglected to tell us, was what we were going to be listening to. The morning lecturer briefly mentioned it was about a treaty violation between Serbia and Croatia, but nothing more. Well there may have been more, but with my limited knowledge of the conflict I really didn’t know what she was talking about.

Well the Peace Palace (the place where the ICJ lives) was AMAZING! For some reason I didn’t take a picture from the outside, but inside I got one quick snap shot of the court room before they told us not to take pictures hehehe. Being the law school nerds we all are, this was kind of exciting! Wow, a real ICJ hearing! Thank excitement lasted about, uhm 10 mins? It was in English but having no background on what was going on, it was very hard to piece things together. All I can honestly remember is something about jurisdiction, a treaty, and genocide. The lawyer (well the judges called him professor?) was very hard to understand even though he was speaking English. I felt bad, because Susana (the program director) was very happy to be there, but I just couldn’t stay interested or worse, AWAKE. My god, I tried to distract myself by looking and trying to figure out what was on the stained glass windows, but it didn’t work. My eyes were closed. I have to say, I didn’t feel so bad considering at one point I looked up and one of the judges actually had his head down for at least 5 full minutes.

Did I mention that I even saw Vladeck asleep? Yea. Tells you how exciting this was for everyone but Susana.