HOPE FOR CAREER DOUBTERS
Joyce Kennard might have inspired a few kids last week when asked whether being a judge had always been her goal.
“Good heavens, no,” the California Supreme Court justice responded during aquestion-and-answer session before hundreds of students attending a special session of oral arguments in Santa Barbara.
Kennard was born in Dutch New Guinea and was placed in a Japanese-run internment camp with her mother at a young age, during World War II. She lived in a Quonset hut for a while after the war and said that “thoughts of becoming a lawyer were not part of my reality.”
Kennard told the students, though, that she had two dreams � to live in America and to get a university education. She managed both, moving to the U.S. at age 20 and studying German at college. Once out of school, though, she said she found out there was “no demand whatsoever for those majoring in German.”
So a boss urged her to get a law degree, and her life’s journey to the California Supreme Court began.
“I owe my career in law,” she told the students, “to fate.”
If that doesn’t give a few kids hope for a legal career, nothing will.
� Mike McKee
LAW SCHOOL HOT FOR CHINA, TOO
The McGeorge School of Law is expanding � all the way to China.
The U.S. government, as part of its Rule of Law in China initiative, recently awarded the law school in Sacramento $1.1 million to improve the Chinese legal education system.
Over two years, professors from McGeorge, American University’s Washington College of Law, and three law schools in China will create a curriculum for future Chinese students that focuses on mediation, arbitration, clinical and advocacy skills. Also, three McGeorge faculty members will teach seminars in China for up to 2 1/2 months while four Chinese educators study at the Sacramento campus.
Traditional Chinese teaching methods rely heavily on lectures, said McGeorge professor Brian Landsberg.
“We’re going to try to help them with skills training where people learn by doing,” he said.
McGeorge had a program in China during the 1980s. One alumnus, Zhu Suli, is now dean of the Beijing School of Law.
McGeorge’s program ultimately ended, however, with the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.
Chinese legal scholars have been eager to introduce American-style advocacy methods to their legal system, in part to respond to the Asian country’s enormous economic growth, said John McIntyre, McGeorge’s assistant dean for development.
“They want outside capital coming in, and probably the best way to do that is to give companies coming in the confidence that there’s a reliable, stable legal system,” he said.
Two years ago, Chilean judges, prosecutors and public defenders studied at McGeorge after Chile adopted a new, American-style criminal justice system.
� Cheryl Miller
