This Week: Judgments and Journals

Hey everyone! Reporting here from week 5 in DC!

This week, I spent most of my time on the briefs for the Election Judgments database. I’ve talked about this in a few of the previous weeks’ blogs, but the Center’s goal is to have this great repository of landmark and groundbreaking election law cases from around the world. Everything including election integrity, ballot access, criminal actions during an election, candidate eligibility – all of it. I won’t be going through every single election law case every decided and instead center on the biggest ones, but I will be keeping my geographic focus relatively broad. With half of the world voting this year, there’s a lot to tackle and not a lot of room to display it all. While saying that, we HAVE been noticing a few specific topics we've come across have been litigated more frequently in recent years: many nascent democracies have struggled with corrupt election practices like ballot altering and voter intimidation, so that may be the string of (unfortunate) election law cases we'll be sticking with for the time being. I'll have more for you on that next week.

On a separate note, one thing about places like IFES (and the opportunity for attorneys to help at organizations like these) that really surprises me is just the breadth of opportunity and types of work one can take on, without falling off of the infamous “too much to do, not enough time to do it” cliff. A few of the staff members was telling me about a recent trip to the Pacific to meet with judges and civil society activists and prepare for an upcoming and likely contentious election. Another member of the staff told me about a trip to Eastern Europe to meet with a legal organization supporting refugee rights in the area. There’s no silo, even so far in my work as an intern. The fact that I’ve read cases from at least 60 countries in five weeks alone is a testament to that.

Another exciting update -- we got our law journal placements! I got placed onto the Bill of Rights Journal, which fits perfectly with all the exciting work I've been able to do so far this summer. If you flip through some past editions, you'll see some really cool student publications on topics related to constitutional rights, rights in general, issues in democracy, and the like. And, along with my incoming cohort, I'll be able to contribute to that!

Pretty short week here otherwise; we had Juneteenth off here so had a great day to spend some time with friends I hadn't seen in a while, and then we get to gear up for the 4th in DC soon enough!

See you all next week!

Hank