Three Great Updates, Two Work Projects, and One Wedding!
Hi everyone!
Thanks for checking back in with me for my second blog of the summer! It’s only been two weeks but as I mentioned last time, I’m LOVING my time here at IFES.
This week, I continued my work on the Election Judgment database cases that I started last week. I’ve made it through everything we have categorized, including cases quite literally from Australia all the way to Zambia. However, the “furthest” countries I’ve looked at would probably have to be both Uruguay and South Korea, which are geographical antipodes from each other (proof – enter “Mokpo,” a southwestern city in South Korea)!
I’ll still be doing some final touches on this over the next couple days, but I’m excited to get to my next projects soon. Working on the database will, again, require most of the summer, but the next step involves getting to really dive into the nitty-gritty details of all the election law cases I’ve collected. Now that they’ve all been categorized and moved around to some degree, it’s time to start briefing – legalspeak that means breaking down the case in a digestible manner. The goal is to find and pull out topics such as the procedural posture – i.e. what actions, if any, lower courts have taken on this specific case – of the case at hand, the nature of the legal question presented, what the court found, its reasoning for such findings, and any applicable remedies the court imposed. It’s more-or-less the who-what-when-where-why of cases, and it can make understanding the important parts of a seventy-five-page case from France about the minutiae of absentee ballots in Marseille much quicker once you have a two-page brief on it.
On a non-law-related note, I got to enjoy an exciting diversion for the summer – one of my friends from college got married over memorial day weekend! In fact, I’m posting this just the day after the ceremony (a few pictures attached below). I mentioned this last week, but I also went to W&M for undergrad and it was so great to see some of my old friends from college. Cooler still, a few of them also went to (and graduated from) W&M law before me and were so eager to check in on my progress, how I was doing, and asking about my classes. It’s always reassuring to know the W&M connection is never far.
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(Photos descriptions, since my Cascade skills are a little limited) |
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| (Below: the view on top of the Carter Mountain Cidery near Charlottesville, VA, minutes before we all got deluged by rain.) | (Below: my best friend Anna Luján and I -- best friends since freshman orientation at WM in 2016. We got to catch up with a ton of old college friends this weekend, and eat up some delicious food.) | (Below: Another view of the Carter Mountain Cidery -- astutely notice me not fully under the umbrella with my back turned to all the storm clouds arriving.) |
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It looks like I’ll be getting into some pretty exciting projects next week at IFES, so I can’t wait to share them all with you!
Hank Blackburn