Explorations

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...

From Jay, on teaching aspiring lawyers: I think many of our previous writings have included bits and pieces of what I am about to write here, but I wanted to put it all together into a picture that is starting to come into focus for me and my work.  The  longer we are here the more complex our take on things, and the more challenging it is to blog about it. We haven’t spent much time blogging about the Big Picture here, but it is always on our minds as we teach young, very smart, enthusiastic students, who listen to tales about social change movements in the US and elsewhere, and consider what that all means to them here in Bhutan, a place that is still scrambling to catch up to the rest of the world. Our students are all very smart, but the country has been very isolated for centuries.   First, a little bit of background.    Bhutan is small—maybe around 180 miles east to west, and 90 miles from the north border with China to the southern border with several Ind...

In Buddhist tradition, every new building needs to be blessed before it is inhabited. But even though JSW’s new campus officially opened about a year and a half ago, the school has not had a consecration ceremony yet, though there has been a desire and plan to do so as soon as feasible. So the blessing ceremony, or the Rabney, is now scheduled to happen on October 5, and there has been a literal mountain of preparations happening in anticipation of what is turning out to be a ginormous celebration. The law school has been the provenance of the Princess, Her Royal Highness, who is the president of the school. She was commissioned to take on this project by her brother, the Fifth King, nearly 13 years ago, and so the consecration, or inauguration as she refers to it, is a kind of coming out party, not just for the school, but for HRH as well. It is her gift to her father, the Fourth King, whose appearance at such an event is apparently very rare. So we will have not just the Princess and...