Week 2: Russian to English Legal Jargon
My second week here at CEELI flew by. It was a short week for, since I took off Friday to go Germany. I am continuing to make headway on the terrorism adjudication checklist and its supporting materials. I’ve been reviewing the criminal procedures and some evidence rules for countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. It’s been fascinating learning about these countries’ procedures, particularly before I’ve gotten a chance to learn about U.S. criminal procedure and rules of evidence. After reviewing the procedures, I am then working to decide how these different procedures rules may be useful in the context of the checklist developed and how they might be helpful for a judge. For example, one of the checklist recommendations is to use pretrial conferences. I am then looking to the procedures to find what is equivalent to a pretrial conference if the procedures say anything about pretrial at all. This way, when a judge is assigned a case, they may look to the language of other countries as a tool, in case their particular country’s procedures are silent on the topic of pretrial procedures. It is interesting to see how each country decides to handle their cases and what some countries make special rules for while others are silent. For example, one country had very specific rules about detention of women who are breastfeeding and how old an infant may be removed from a woman who is being detained, while all others I have reviewed are silent on the matter.
I’ve also spent some time this week helping edit articles written by former fellows of CEELI. Most fellows are from eastern European countries, where English is not their native language. Editing a non-native speakers work has been a challenging process to make sure that the message they want to communicate is maintained, while working through grammatical and vocabulary issues. It has also been interesting to ensure that the legal jargon used is correct for that particular country when writers talk about court decisions and proceedings. Legal jargon and terminology of the U.S. isn’t necessarily shared by other countries, so as part of the editing process I’ve been working to understand the legal language of the countries discussed in these academic papers to ensure that it’s the correct term, not a vocabulary error.
This week also gave me some interesting insight into a few of the issues CEELI is experiencing in their efforts to make the judiciary in India more efficient. The judiciary experiences huge delays, arrears and pendency of cases in court. Judges are overly involved in numerous administrative tasks, such as human resources in the court, development of court infrastructure, managing finances, communication, protocol, legal aid, legal education, etc. The extra tasks consume between 40 – 60% of the time of each judge, delaying court cases. In an attempt to address the case backlog, the India government allocated funds to hire Court Managers (CM) for the state constitutional courts (high courts). The CM has been largely unsuccessful due a lack of government support and funding, the nature of employment offered to the CM in different jurisdictions, and relationships between the CM and judges. These challenges the India courts face impact’s CEELI’s ability to provide its support, an issue they are continuing to approach.
On a more personal note, this weekend was exciting, as I got to visit my boyfriend’s hometown in Germany. He currently works in the U.S., but was in Germany for a work trip. We took that as an opportunity to use the weekend for me to visit his family, including his adorable niece and nephew below.
