Justice for All: Study Abroad Leads to Legal Reform in Uganda

In July 2010, I was in Uganda for the third time. I’d spent the evening watching the 2010 World Cup final match projected on a bedsheet taped to the outer wall of a hotel courtyard in Gulu—where just a few years earlier, international war criminal Joseph Kony had tortured and maimed thousands. My companions for the evening had been two teenage brothers I’d met six months earlier in a juvenile prison, where they’d been languishing for nearly 2 years waiting to be put on trial for murder.

The journey I took to get here was unexpected to say the least, and it changed my life, and my students’ lives, in ways we never imagined.

Three years earlier, two students wandered into my office at Pepperdine Law School with an idea and a request. They cochaired Pepperdine Law’s student chapter of International Justice Mission (IJM), and had arranged a Justice Week at the law school in an effort to raise awareness of injustice in the developing world. One of the keynote speakers that week was Bob Goff, president of Restore International. At the end of Bob’s talk, he invited the two hundred in attendance to travel with him to East Africa the next month for a judicial conference he was hosting in Uganda.

“Can we go with Bob, Dean Gash?” At that time, I was quite skeptical about what sort of impact law students could have on the justice system of a developing country. Nevertheless, after discussing this with my boss