Explorations

More thoughts from Jay: A courtroom in Wangdue-Phodrang district court. The masks, based in a mythology, roughly represent the defense side in white, the evil dark side prosecution, and the judge in the middle. Being back in Seattle has given us a little bit of time and space to think about JSW and our experiences in Bhutan. For much of the time we were there, my perspective on Bhutan’s legal system was based on my experience at JSW, where many faculty do not actually have law degrees, and of those, very few have any experience practicing law. It was not easy to learn what the real-life practice of law was like for attorneys in court. One of the few ways students get practical exposure is through clinics taught by faculty with legal experience, including our colleague Prof. Dema Lham, who has taught the popular Human Dignity Clinic for several years. Through Dema, I was able to build a relationship with the Bhutan National Law Institute (BNLI), the government agency whose mission is ju...

Every year in the fall, there is a day of celebration called the Blessed Rainy Day, marking the end of the rainy season. This year it was Spetmeber 23, and the students planned to have a khuru tournament to celebrate. Khuru is a traditional Bhutanese game, like lawn darts, with small targets spaced 20  meters  or more (60+ feet) apart. It is a tamer version of the traditional archery that is very common. (The movie  “Travelers and Magicians”  opens up with a great scene of traditional Bhutanese archery, including the crazy taunting that happens in front of the target, which unfortunately leads to many injuries, or worse).    Come Blessed Rainy Day, however, the students had to cancel their plans because it was… too rainy! So they pushed it back a few weeks, until they were sure it would be a dry day.   One Sunday in mid-October, we went out for a walk only to find khuru had taken over much of the parking lot next to the library. This area has been de...

“Everyone is going to Australia.” I hear this from so many people, so often. Colleagues at school, people in town, taxi drivers, officials, everyone knows a lot of people who have left the country. Even we know people who have left the country, or have tried to leave, or are waiting to leave, or are planning to leave.  The law school is not immune to this exodus. In the year after the campus moved to its permanent location in Pangbisa, the staff lost 20 people - out of a total staff of 60. And while much of that can be attributed to the fact that  a lot of people didn’t want to commute to Pangbisa from Thimphu, or move to Paro, the astonishing stat was that 14 out of those 20 people left for Australia.   Australia has long been where many Bhutanese have gone for school or to work. Some people also have gone to Canada and the UK, and to a lesser degree, the US. But Australia now has a large Bhutanese community, many there permanently, which draws more people to settle. I r...

After spending nearly a week doing trainings in Punakha, in the central part of the country,  with our friend and colleague David,   we were all quite happy for the chance to take a quick trip to the Pobjikha valley. At over 9,000 ft, the  valley  is a rare high altitude wetland, and winter home to the globally threatened black necked cranes. We got there early enough to take a walk through the woods and farms bordering the valley, trying to glimpse any of the 13 cranes that had arrived in the valley the previous week. This group apparently was the advanced guard for the winter migration. The cranes are the subject of great scrutiny - they summer in the Tibetan plateau and winter mostly in Bhutan, the Pobjikha valley being the largest of several areas they inhabit. Official counts from earlier years pegged the number at about 300 spending the winter; there are only several thousand of them on the planet, threatened primarily by loss of habitat. Most of Bhut...

Everything on campus stopped for the week before the Rabney. Classes were completely suspended, bookshelves and couches were moved out of the library so it could be turned into a dining hall for the royal family, copy machines and garbage cans were removed from the hallways where the royals would pass, and no one was in their offices because they were all out doing last minute touch up to the campus. The rain continued pretty much non-stop the whole week before hand, and the day before the Rabney saw torrents of rain flowing over all of the meticulous preparations and decorations. The day of, everyone was very nervous about whether the rain would stop long enough for the royal procession, the ceremonies, the entertainment, the lunch, the celebration of the campus.   But the night before the big celebration was the start of the cleansing ceremony. It began with many monks performing rituals in the altar room, which is the top floor of the  utse , the main tower on campus. After...