Week 4: More Feedback, Case Law Analysis, and Nigerian Petitions
With my first few weeks at IFES firmly under my belt, I began this week by beginning the latest project assigned to me: reviewing the ongoing petitions from Nigeria’s most recent presidential elections. Nigeria, the most populous country on the African continent, held its presidential elections in February of this year. Immediately after the results were announced, losing candidates filed complaints to the nation’s Presidential Election Petition Court. Five complaints were filed, alleging that technological failures yielded inaccurate results, questioning the qualification of the winning candidate, and so on. Two complaints have been withdrawn and dismissed. I read the petitions (apart from one, which is over 200 pages long—I felt that flipping through that case and getting the main points was a better use of my time), familiarized myself with the cases, wrote brief summaries for my own notes, and I continually check back to mark the progress of the three ongoing cases. I have more work to do here, but this was a good start.
Even with employees often working remotely, IFES’ offices are busy. Meetings with dignitaries, trainings, presentations, along with the standard hustle and bustle of an office, can all make for a noisy work environment. With that in mind, I took some time at the end of the week to work from home; taking advantage of my quiet apartment to read through several more cases from the Pacific Islands region for the ElectionJudgments database. My summaries for those cases are underway, though they admittedly seem to keep getting set aside for other more pressing projects. I was sent cases from Tunisia and Kenya to keep on my radar for this ongoing project; more on those to come.
I also received more feedback from my contributions to the judicial curriculum modules—little edits here and there, but nothing major. Keeping in mind the “finalized but open” status that I’m aiming for, Modules 1 and 2 are very nearly complete now. I hope to begin Module 3 early next week and see how far along I can get with the following modules.
This week I also kept an eye open for another major Supreme Court case on elections in the United States: Moore v. Harper. I monitored SCOTUSblog.com at 10:00am every opinion day, but the case opinion was not released. Now confident that the opinion will be released next week, I’ll be ready to tackle it just as I tackled Allen v. Milligan.
Weekend events: National Museum of American History, and I celebrated my 27th birthday with other William & Mary Law students who are working in the DC area this summer.