Engaging the world
U.S. rule of law should remain inspiring across the globe
University of Pittsburgh law student Ashley Hogan and I were ready to board our flight to Kuwait when we saw the news. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had refused to stay the injunction imposed by a Seattle federal judge against President Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of people from seven predominantly Muslim countries into the United States.
We were on our way to continue a process I had begun with the U.S. Commerce Department more than 10 years ago to train Middle East students in international commercial law and arbitration.
This year we were scheduled to work with law students from Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, preparing them for a later competition in Hong Kong and Vienna. Two of these countries were targets of the Trump ban, and some of the others have been the source of individuals who have caused loss of life in the United States as a result of terrorist acts (it has been reported that none of the seven countries targeted by the ban has been the source of an individual who has killed anyone in the United States in an act of terrorism).
Judge James Robart and the 9th Circuit had made our work somewhat easier in Kuwait. While our training sessions all deal with international commercial law and arbitration, at base they are about the rule of law and its importance to a functioning society and the growth of democratic institutions.
When our courts determine that ill-considered executive actions with questionable constitutional bases are subject to legal scrutiny through judicial review, we demonstrate to the world that ours truly is a system of laws and not one in which the powerful can simply do whatever they want despite the rights of others.
We also demonstrate the importance of the fact that those who designed our Constitution — both after the Revolutionary War and through amendments after the Civil War — created rights that are available not just to U.S. citizens, but to all persons. Those who drafted these provisions of our Constitution understood that a functioning democratic system based on the rule of law could be neither discriminatory nor insular, but had to be built on values of inclusion and protection of minorities — as a necessary method of protecting us all.
As our flight neared the Middle East, I turned to an essay by Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.” Her words from nearly a century ago remind us that the tensions we are now experiencing are not something new. Cather provides vivid context in her description of late 19th-century developments:
“Colonies of European people, Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, spread across our bronze prairies like daubs of color on a painter’s palette. They brought with them something that this neutral new world needed ever more than the immigrants needed land. Unfortunately, their American neighbors were seldom open-minded enough to understand the Europeans, or to profit by their older traditions. Our settlers from New England, cautious and convinced of their own superiority, kept themselves insulated as much as possible from foreign influences.”
Our work at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for International Legal Education, with law students in the Middle East and elsewhere, has demonstrated the importance of engagement with the world. But that engagement must go beyond simply receiving those who are escaping conditions we are generations removed from. It has highlighted the importance of receiving those who return to home countries in transition, in order to improve lives there.
Students we met early on have returned home to become professors, professionals, parliamentarians and leaders in every part of society. And they have taken home an appreciation for democratic institutions and the rule of law.
When those educated in law in the United States return home and share and build upon the values of democracy and rule of law, they make us safer in the United States. When democracies thrive and economies grow in transition countries, the tensions that press people to leave those countries diminish. When values learned in U.S. law schools are made the basis for new laws as countries grow and develop, the tensions that cause international confrontation fail to develop, or are at least reduced.
Our national security is not enhanced by alienating people in other countries or abusive Twitter diatribes. It improves with face-to-face opportunities to share the importance of democracy, inclusion and the rule of law. There is a better path to a peaceful world than walls and travel bans. It begins with education.
As I watch my students train future leaders in the Middle East in the values of the rule of law, I see our chance to build a better world.