A great deal of attention is being paid to international cooperation on law enforcement and the death penalty. For Joshua Brook and Noah Leavitt, their achievements in this area of law have come to the forefront.

Brook and Leavitt, both 3Ls at the University of Michigan Law School, are strongly opposed to the death penalty. In fact, the two had a close connection to a major international case involving the ongoing debate.

In 1999, two brothers, German nationals, were executed for the 1982 bank robbery and stabbing death of a 63-year-old bank manager in Arizona. Karl and Walter LaGrand were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Arizona authorities did not inform the brothers that they were entitled to assistance from the German Consulate under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The brothers appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower courts’ decisions. The German government then pursued a claim of a treaty violation with the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body of the United Nations.

The two law students had firsthand experience working on this case. Both interned the summer after their first year with professor Bruno Simma, affiliated overseas faculty at the University of Michigan Law School and member of the International Law Commission (ILC) in Geneva. The ILC consists of 34 lawyers and scholars who develop international legal norms.

During the ILC’s four-week summer recess, Brook and Leavitt followed Simma to the Institute for Public International Law at the University of Munich, where he serves as director.

For three weeks, the students and a team of assistants pored over Germany’s 300-page brief on the LaGrand case and the U.S. response. Their job was to help Germany present its best argument.

When they started working on the case, it was obscure. "Few people [other than legal specialists] had ever heard of the Vienna Convention, and the debate over the death penalty in the U.S. was muted, at best," Leavitt says. "Both major presidential candidates were pro-capital punishment, so there was little national soul-searching on the issue. Between the time that we were in the Hague and the time the decision was announced, the situation changed dramatically."

In November 2000, the team sat in the Great Hall of Justice at the Hague to observe the oral arguments in the LaGrand case.

"Probably the most amazing aspect of being involved with the case was that it took place during a period of incredible legal and political developments on the death penalty, both in the U.S. and internationally, and that we got to participate in a case that is going to reshape the landscape and the strategies for how human rights lawyers are going to approach their work," Leavitt says.

"We were very proud to be part of a process that has reinvigorated an aspect of the human rights movement here at home," Brook says. "LaGrand highlighted one of the most significant trends in human rights law—bridging the gap between international agreements and local practice. Creative human rights activists are finding more and more ways to use international law to advocate on behalf of their clients."

The pair will continue their work against the death penalty. Last August, Leavitt served as a delegate of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, where he helped convene an international roundtable on the discriminatory aspects of capital punishment. In January 2001, Brook presented a talk on the LaGrand case at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In addition, the students published an op-ed in the International Herald-Tribune last June.

As for the future, both have garnered post-graduate federal judicial clerkships. Leavitt has been working in South Africa doing human rights law and refugee law at the University of Cape Town, in part, spurred by the LaGrand case. "I am interested in being a clinical teacher in lawful imprisonment and death penalty issues," Leavitt says. Brook plans a career in international human rights as a practitioner and an academic.

Do you know a distinguished law student (continuing for 2002-03) who would make an interesting subject for Spotlight? Please e-mail suggestions along with your name, address, and daytime/evening phone numbers to abastulawyer@abanet.org (subject line: Spotlight).