Summer Abroad: Oxford: Transitional Justice

Catalog No.: 870

Course Description:

This tutorial explores various types of justice initiatives available to societies emerging from armed conflict or authoritarian regimes, seeking to redress historic injustices or to achieve national reconciliation. It studies responses such as truth and reconciliation commissions, commissions of enquiry, initiatives aimed at memorialization, explores the supposed tension between peace and justice, and critically evaluates the extent to which responsive measures have served to reinvigorate national justice systems affected by armed conflict or atrocity crimes.

Professor Susan Lamb has worked for twenty years with various United Nations and other responses to atrocity crimes, including as Senior Legal Officer for the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer rouge trials in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Chef de Cabinet to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Tanzania, and in various roles with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. More recently she has worked on related civil society initiatives seeking accountability for serious violations of international criminal and humanitarian law committed in the course of the Syrian conflict. She is a former professor at the Jindal Global Law School in India and a current faculty member of Deakin Law School, Australia. She received arts and law degrees from the University of Otago, New Zealand and undertook doctoral studies at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She is admitted to legal practice in New Zealand. Learn more about Prof. Lamb here: http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/susan-lamb.

Instruction replicates the Oxford University tutorial method. Each student studies selected topics in a designated field of law under the direct supervision of an English law professor and legal scholar (the tutor) with expertise in the field. When registering for the program, students select the fields of law in which they are interested. Every effort is made to give them their first choice, however tutorial choices do change each summer. Tutorials are paired with a two-unit English Legal Institution Seminar

A student meets with his or her tutor five times during the program (an average of once each week). In advance of each tutorial, the tutor poses one or more topics or questions on which the student is to write an essay (generally about 2,000 words) after reading materials provided by the tutor in an extensive relevant bibliography of required or recommended readings. During each tutorial, students will discuss the assigned topic or questions with the tutor and will be asked to present (sometimes read) and defend their essay. Some professors ask the student to submit the paper to the tutor one day in advance of the meeting. Some tutors prefer to meet with the student one-on- one; these tutorial sessions meet for approximately 1-1/4 hour. Other tutors prefer to meet with students one-on- two; these tutorial sessions meet for approximately 2 hours.

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