CHICAGO, July 24, 2004 Read LAWFUEL’s PRESS RELEASES for all today’s law announcements
– As part of a project to restructure legal
education in Iraq, undertaken by the International Human Rights Law Institute
(IHRLI) at DePaul University through a United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) contract, eight Iraqi law professors will visit Chicago
for a study tour.
The professors, who will be in Chicago from July 23 through
Aug. 7, will participate in substantive briefing sessions on relevant
contemporary legal issues at several Chicago law schools including, DePaul,
Northwestern, Chicago-Kent and John Marshall. The first briefing will be held
at 11 a.m. on July 26 in the DePaul College of Law’s Rare Book Room, 25 E.
Jackson Blvd., 5th floor.
The Chicago visit is the final stretch of a tour that included study
visits to universities in Egypt and Italy and a one-week series of training
seminars at the International Institute for Higher Studies in Criminal
Sciences in Siracusa, Italy. The seminars, which were attended by 42 Iraqi
legal educators, were taught by U.S. law professors, including M. Cherif
Bassiouni, president of DePaul’s IHRLI; William Mock, associate dean and
professor of law at the John Marshall Law School; and Kenneth Abbott,
professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law.
The professors represent 11 law schools and include six deans and three
associate deans. While in Chicago, they also will visit and receive briefings
at the American Bar Association Foundation, the Illinois Supreme Court and the
United States District Court. They are scheduled to visit two Chicago law
firms — Baker & McKenzie, and Lord, Bissel and Brook.
The Legal Education Reform in Iraq Project is funded by a multi-million
dollar grant from the USAID. It is geared toward the broad-based reform of the
Iraqi legal education system through its main four components: 1) educational
reform through rule of law; 2) curricular reform; 3) a clinical education
program; and 4) technical and administrative support to repair the law
libraries and information technology services.
The first of the libraries, located in Baghdad, will be completed by the
end of this year as a modern, functional library. Most of the law libraries in
Iraq were looted, burned or destroyed, as were many of the basic structures of
the 11 law schools in that country.
“Legal education reform in Iraq will prove to be a fundamental pillar of
support to the democratic progress and economic recovery in Iraq,” said
Bassiouni, who heads DePaul’s and the Italian institutes at DePaul and in
Italy. “We hope that by engaging Iraqi legal educators and representatives of
legal education organizations in other countries we can help the educators
adopt a system that is their own.”
