Week 9: Back to “ElectionJudgments,” Nigerian Petitions, and Fellow Interns
This week, with my time at IFES winding down, I was asked to refocus on my ElectionJudgments database research, with the focus still on Pacific Island cases, as well as Middle Eastern and North African cases, and a smattering of others sent my way over the course of the summer. I got a handful of cases summarized this week—these were from Vanuatu, the Philippines, and the Marshall Islands. I also revisited a summary from Nepal that I’d worked on in my first week or two with IFES. As I think I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the nature of this project is such that I will never be “finished” with my work here—with cases being released all around the world all the time, full-time IFES personnel will always be able to circle back to this project and add more to the database. This task fell into something like a “if you run out of things to do, this is what you should tackle” category. The problem there has been that I haven’t been running out of things to do this summer, so the task of summarizing cases kept getting pushed aside for other projects. With an eye now on my quickly approaching last days at IFES, it felt important to make sure I’d completed a few more cases for the database. In my remaining time with IFES, I would like to make more progress here than I have been making throughout the summer so far.
In the middle of the week, IFES staff made a point to organize a quick virtual meeting so that all the interns at IFES can get to know one another a bit more. I am the only legal intern in IFES HQ, and my daily tasks don’t lead me to interactions with other interns, so it was nice being able to see what other interns in finance, IT, and other teams get up to. Rather less fun, this meeting also made me feel old, as the other interns tended to be in their undergraduate years—I turned 27 last month.
At the end of the week, I turned in my overall summary for the Nigerian Presidential Election Petitions and met virtually with in-country IFES personnel. While headlines there have been focused on the recent coup in Niger, the court nonetheless continues its deliberations and is expected to release its opinion within two months. I believe turning in this summary will represent the end of any major work on this project—I will receive some feedback, and a few items here or there may need to be polished, but barring an unexpected court opinion or bombshell development, this task will become less of a priority.
As the summer winds down, I still have a fair amount of work to do in the judicial curriculum modules. With occasional items still left to tackle in modules 1-5 and with 6-7 so far untouched, I’ll move these up my priority list in the remaining two weeks I have at IFES. While I understand that most of the tasks I’m working on will continue to be polished and edited well after I have gone back to Williamsburg for my 2L year, I am determined to get things as complete as I can possibly get them. I’m finding now in the past few days that my work days are really starting to fly by as I pay more and more attention to time allocation for my work.
It’s crunch time!
Weekend events: Business Law Review orientation and back to Williamsburg for some errands