Onward and upward

Hurrah!

In the past few days I was accepted onto the Denver Journal for International Law and Policy. Technical law-loser talk is "I wrote on the journal." This is great news for me after the hassle and complete agony of the Candidacy process. The whole process felt like self-induced anxiety, bewilderment and always feeling like I didn't know what on earth I was doing or supposed to be doing. Stumbling through the legal way to cite and teaching myself from The Bluebook for hours on end was not exactly fun. Then, I wrote a "survey" paper that had an argument. Again, not my best work. I once laughed aloud while writing when thinking about how badly I felt for the poor soul who had to read my paper. I was a goner, sure not to pass. I had already convinced myself that I was just happy to have had the willpower to get through it without giving up. (It's not required to do a journal and it's easy to push off until the next round of Candidacy.)

I really liked my topic, though, and I hope to develop it more in the fall. I chose to write about protecting traditional medicinal knowledge of indigenous people. The issue is that big pharmaceutical companies are going to third world countries and getting patents on things indigenous people have known/been using for hundreds of years. Once the pharm companies get patents, the indigenous people no longer have rights to keep doing their own cultural, every-day-knowledge practices. More than that, though, the pharm companies are making a big profit with no benefits to the indigenous people who told them about the medicinal uses of plants.

As I had such limited time to write the paper and the paper was no more than 12 pages including footnotes, I had to drastically limit my argument. So, I argued that the legal framework for protecting traditional medicinal knowledge is a bad way to try to protect it. Right now, people consider TMK as a form of intellectual property. So international lawsuits over rights are over property rights. I suggested in my paper two alternatives. First, stronger domestic law would avoid some conflicts because there would be state-backing for indigenous people, rather than pitting indigenous people against big 1st world corporations. The second suggestion was that instead of thinking of TMK as property, think of it as some sort of human right or indigenous people's right. This would solve a lot of problems because TMK doesn't have a lot of the characteristics of regular property. It's hard to protect something as property when it doesn't fit into the accepted legal definition of property. Anyway, it was pretty cool to read about different plants and herbs that indigenous people have been using for medicine for hundreds of years. It's kind of the fusion of my interest in indigenous rights, international things, love of knowledge (philosophy!), health and law.

The other big thing this week is that I finished my first grad class toward my masters! I took a 9 hour (2 question) essay exam today and e-mailed it in. Hurrah! It was International Political Theory and I gobbled that stuff right up. I loved it. Hope the exam turns out well. It's amazing how much less stressful exams at grad school are than law school exams. And, I had so much more confidence that I could do well. Law school is such a downer - always feeling like you have no idea what to expect, purposefully unreachable standards ("It's impossible for anyone to get near a perfect score on my exams"), and stupid curved grading. Loving grad school. :)

Oh yeah, AND, I did my first Side Crow in yoga. I've been trying to do it since January!

Onward and upward...