The silver lining to the pandemic was that the sudden extra time left no more excuses for me to avoid going back to school. In my late thirties with three children, it seemed crazy, and on some level it was. Now, in my final year of law school with work hours having returned to pre-pandemic levels, people tell me they don’t know how I juggle it all. Frankly, I don’t either. Wake up in the morning, mainline the caffeine du jour, knock out each check box on the to-do list, make tomorrow’s list, crash for the night. Wash, rinse, repeat. The unexpected upshot, though, has been that my hectic schedule balancing work, school, softball games, hockey practices, and band recitals has left little time for self-doubt or second-guessing. Put the blinders on and go.
So, when our beloved, late Professor Ved Nanda told our International Human Rights Law class last fall about the Leonard v.B. Sutton writing award for the best paper of the year on any international or comparative law topic of the student’s choosing, I put it on my to-do list and never looked back. With a family to support, unpaid internships simply aren’t in our financial cards. I needed other ways to build relationships and stand out from the crowd. And what better way to do that than winning publication in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy and a trip to study abroad at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands?
Amid many strong submissions, my paper, Not Woman Enough: How World Athletics’ Treatment of Women with Differences in Sexual Development Violates the Olympic Charter and the UN’s Conventions Against Racial Discrimination and Discrimination Against Women was fortunate enough to win the Sutton Award, and I was off this summer to the Hague to spend three weeks in the Disneyland of international law, rubbing elbows with ambassadors, ministers of foreign affairs, diplomats, judges from the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, and scholars from 89 different countries
. The program I attended included three mandatory lectures every morning and then a choose-your-own-adventure set up for the afternoons. Some spent their afternoons in additional optional lectures. Some spent their time on the white sandy beaches of the North Sea. Others, like me, spent our early afternoons on excursions and then our evenings at the Peace Palace Library working on research papers. I was able to spend time in embassies with ambassadors from Iraq, Armenia, and Lithuania. Ghana’s ambassador hosted six of us in his home and personally taught me how to eat fried redfish head (and that was even before opening the wine).
We went behind the scenes at the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone (RSCSL), the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We were even at the Peace Palace—home of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—on July 19th when they read their advisory opinion on the Legal Consequence Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem. After the reading, we walked outside to protests and chants from both camps accusing each other and the American government of condoning terrorism and genocide.
We learned ethics and philosophy from ICC judge Iulia Motoc and Intellectual Property Law from Edward Kwakwa, the Assistant Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). (He also taught a semester at University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law back in the ‘80s—small world.) We learned space law from Stephan Hobe, the director of the Institute of Air Law, Space Law, and Cyber Law, and about genocide laws governing individual and state perpetrators from Paola Gaeta, Executive Board member of the Journal of International Criminal Justice. The list goes on, and I’m running low on my word-count allowance. But I would be remiss not to at least mention the generosity of ICJ Judge Hilary Charlesworth to spend her time teaching us about the life cycle of a case in the court three days before the court read its Israel/Palestine advisory opinion.
Somewhere in all of this, I managed to make friends with a Russian human rights lawyer now exiled with her family in Barcelona after being labelled an enemy of the State, a Chechen who left the war as a child and is now living in Belgium, a Somali maritime lawyer, a climate law instructor from India, a Georgian foreign affairs department chair, an advisor to His Majesty the King of Jordan, and a Nigerian Ph.D. student who took a break from her own paper to treat me to my first boba tea to celebrate my submission of Sex and Gender in Sports: Examining the Constitutionality of Transgender Sports Laws in the United States and the Need for a New Approach to Scrutiny. Our hodgepodge included Muslims, Christians, Jews, and nonbelievers, Brits and those from countries still digging themselves out from colonization, and an LGBTQI+ WhatsApp group with 21 members from 13 different countries.
Now that I’m back in Colorado (and failing miserably to kick the eight-hour time change), I can’t help but wonder how any of this might inform my future job prospects, but what I do know is that no matter how different people may seem to be on the surface, we’re really not that much different at all. Except, maybe, when it comes to picking which team to root for during the Euros.
Rachel Crass is in her final year of law school at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, where she is pursuing certificates in International Legal Studies and Constitutional Rights and Remedies. As an elite athlete representative for an Olympic sport for fourteen years and the Colorado state chairperson for another international sport, Rachel's focus is primarily on international sports law and remedying human rights violations related to the Olympic and Paralympic movement for women, LGBTQ, disabled, and persecuted athletes in the United States and worldwide. Outside of law school, Rachel is an employee with the City and County of Denver and lives in Arvada with her husband, three children, and a menagerie of furry, scaly, and finned friends.