It’s been a quiet couple of weeks at the Hague Law Blog– I just returned last weekend from a lengthy trip to Québec, England, and Scotland; and it was a doozy.
For lawyers who haven’t had the opportunity, I’ll say again that foreign lands are the best possible place to get your CLE hours. Take one of your favorite humans along (daughters take mothers and vice versa, wives take husbands and vice versa… one guy who traveled to Turkey with us a few years ago brought his whole family). Visit places you’ll never get to see on the regular tour. Connect with colleagues from back home and abroad.
Insert here yet another shameless plug here for my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and its overseas CLE programs. That’s how I got to Oxford.
And it’s how I came to stand in a place that has witnessed greatness so many times that they’ve literally stopped hyping it. Before the majority side despatch box (yes, it’s spelled that way) in the House of Commons. Where Gladstone and Disraeli battled each other, in alternating stints as PM. Where Thatcher rallied a country ’round the first war I remember. Where Tony Blair fostered hope and later disappointment. Where Winston Churchill talked of the blood, toil, tears, and sweat necessary to defeat Nazi tyranny. How ironic that my visit there came just days before the sadness of Charlottesville and the renewed rise of fascist apologists.
Yet even that sadness does not wholly diminish the joy of the trip. I was able to see old friends in Glasgow after more than two decades apart, I had a pint in the birthplace of Bilbo Baggins, and I sat in a chair occupied by justices of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
To top it off, I learned a whole lot, met people face-to-face that I work with regularly only via the internet, and satisfied quite a bit of intellectual curiosity.
All that said, it’s good to be home.
