By Matthew Lamberti
City University of New York School of Law
When I started law school in the fall of 2006, I had two goals: work overseas and learn Spanish. Well, and graduate, so three goals.
During the summer of 2007, I was fortunate enough to work at the Legal Resources Center in Grahamstown, South Africa, through the generosity of a Public Interest Lawyers Association fellowship. Since my route to law school was somewhat circuitous, it was in Grahamstown that I got my first exposure to many of the basics of legal training: client counseling, live court observation, updating and fact-checking depositions, navigating municipal bureaucracies, writing memos, and making really good coffee.
The most exciting, and humbling, moment of that summer—indeed, probably the most humbling moment of my life—came when two colleagues and I drove out to the hinterland town of Cradock to speak with four women on whose behalf the LRC was pressing a civil rights case. The case stemmed from the political assassination of four men traveling to an organizing meeting in Port Elizabeth in July 1985. The men, who have come to be known as the Cradock Four, were assassinated, their bodies mutilated, burned, and deposited hundreds of miles apart, while their car was stripped of identifying documents and also burned. A police investigation found that these murders were the result of random violence and the case was closed. Such was justice under the apartheid state.
I got to speak with Nyameka Goniwe, widow of teacher and political activist Matthew Goniwe. For the past fifteen years Ms. Goniwe has been a community organizer in Cape Town and the Eastern Cape, quietly continuing a legacy of grassroots activism and racial healing, the need for which in no way disappeared with the advent of full legal rights for all South African citizens. I played a very small role that day in gathering and confirming the information that the LRC needed. But Ms. Goniwe’s patient explanations of her past and present—mirroring, in some ways, South Africa’s past and present — gave me a different look at this concept of “justice” we sometimes talk about in law school.
Alas, even though my flights to and from South Africa allowed me eighteen hours of layover time in Madrid, I started my second year of law school not knowing a word of Español. And given my anticipated career path of working with immigrant communities in New York City, I felt that some competence in Spanish prior to graduation was a necessity. So I took on an academic year internship with the Manhattan Borough President’s office in the hope of freeing up my second-year summer for a language immersion program. Again I was lucky to receive financial assistance, this time as the recipient of a no-strings-attached scholarship from the Columbian Lawyers Association of Queens County. I began to make plans to spend the summer of 2007 learning Spanish in Peru.
And by “make plans,” I mean “buy a one-way ticket to Lima.”
In many ways, this summer turned out to be the opposite of law school. I left a semester full of deadlines, student group responsibilities, required courses and challenging electives, exams, papers, friends and colleagues, and basic schedule over-commitment, to find myself on June 12 in a new country, alone, with nothing to do but concentrate on a new language. It turned out to require a lot of concentration.
During my two weeks in Lima I took intensive immersion classes at El Sol language school, from 9-5 every day. In addition to navigating a new, large (approximately nine million people) city, I had to use parts of my brain that had more or less lay dormant since my first year of undergrad. My classes—usually solo or with one other beginning student—were taught in Spanish right from the start, and as a loudmouth with a background in teaching and studying literature, I struggled with having such a limited vocabulary, and constantly asking people to repeat themselves. Even though life was peaceful and easy compared to the grind of the law curriculum, I arrived home each night exhausted and dreading the thought of homework, which my teachers faithfully assigned. In this sense only was my summer in Peru comparable to law school.
But I appeared to make rapid progress — either that or Peruvians are extremely complimentary and patient — and by the time I arrived in the sun-drenched Andean town of Arequipa at the end of June, I was basically able to communicate whatever I needed to on an “advanced tourist” level of language comprehension: directions, times, prices, city information, my own needs in terms of creature comforts and language instruction. I planted myself in Arequipa for the next six weeks, and took individual Spanish lessons with two wonderful tutors, Sandra and Jeannett. Jeannett forced new tenses on me and ruthlessly corrected the perpetual shortage of tildes in my conjugations. And though after two hectic years I wanted to spend as much time alone as possible, Sandra was great at pushing me out of my comfort zone and into the public square with my limited Spanish skills.
At one point Sandra told me she had arranged for me to meet some Peruvian law students at the local university, San Agustín, and the two of us put together a simple questionnaire about their experience as law students. Although the language barrier prevented me from delving too deeply into any particular issue, students were very generous with their time, and I found many of their comments similar to what my CUNY classmates or other North American law students might say. The one common theme was a gap between positive law and social reality: yes the law guarantees equal rights on the basis of, say, gender, but women still face de facto discrimination in terms of employment, wages, and the prosecution of sex-based crimes. There is room for dedicated lawyers to do progressive work, but as a whole the profession suffers from a venal and elitist reputation. Several students nonetheless spoke optimistically about their desire to pursue a law degree based on commitment to a particular social justice concern.
In talking to these students and working professionals, however, I discovered a couple significant differences between the two countries’ legal systems. In terms of training, the law curriculum is something a college student chooses at an early age in Peru. Students generally enter law school as undergraduates and complete five or six consecutive years of education before graduating with a law degree. I think some of them were non-plussed by an inquisitive foreign law student, who also happened to be in his mid-thirties.
Professionally speaking, I learned about one key distinction from my friend Saulo, a business lawyer who has done graduate study in law in the United States. Saulo was eager to talk about the Brown line of cases and the Fourteenth Amendment, fascinated by—but also fairly expert on—the use of case law and precedent to expand protections to groups not originally envisioned by the 1954 decision. His fascination, he explained, was based on the fact that precedent plays a much more limited role in Peruvian jurisprudence and lawyering. According to Saulo, almost every aspect of positive law in Peru is codified. So there is something like our Restatements of torts, or contracts, but they are much more than guidelines—they are national statutes. Arguing and adjudicating then, are somewhat restricted by these codes, perhaps like the Continental systems of civil law.
On a personal level, Arequipa turned out to be the perfect place for a lengthy stay and further immersion in Spanish: friendly people, sun and blue skies all day long, snow-capped mountains and a volcano in the background, great food, wonderful architecture and history (I was there while the town celebrated its 468th anniversary), and relative proximity to three of Peru’s most famous treasures: the Colca Canyon, Lake Titicaca, and the mountain ruins of Machu Picchu. At each of these places words failed me—whether I was trying to express the experience in English or Spanish. Likewise my Spanish was not quite up to the level of my frustration when I participated in a couple time-honored tourist traditions: contracting a 36-hour stomach sickness, and having my wallet lifted on a busy street.
That said, the summer experience has already paid dividends as I begin my third-year clinical work at CUNY. My case involves an asylum claim by a Latin American citizen, and I have been able to do some research and translations of Spanish-language newspaper articles addressing country conditions related to our client’s well-founded fear of future persecution. In addition, I’ve been able to—slowly—do Spanish phone intakes for my volunteer placement with Families for Freedom, a Manhattan-based support network for those with loved ones affected by deportation proceedings. I hope that further practice and facility with the language will continue to serve me well once I accomplish that last goal — graduation. Dedos cruzados.
