The Public Law Center has conducted numerous international training events, both in New Orleans and abroad, in various topic areas, as more fully described below. The International Legislative Drafting Institute is held every summer by The Public Law Center.

International Legislative Training

The Center has conducted successful training events in the following subject areas:

• legislative drafting and legislative process
• public participation and citizen advocacy
• judicial reform and judicial disciplinary procedures
• law revision and codification
• alternative dispute resolution

By drawing upon other law faculty as resources, the Center also has the capability to provide training in a wide variety of substantive legal areas:

• criminal law and procedure
• constitutional law
• civil procedure
• commercial law
• environmental law
• international trade
• intellectual property law
• urban law and zoning
• admiralty and maritime law
• clinical legal education

The Public Law Center also has access to an extensive network of law school alumni and public officials who can provide training in other areas of expertise:

• court administration
• judicial associations
• bar associations

International Training Events

In 1991, TPLC initiated a Scholar-in-Residence program. The first Scholar-in-Residence was Mr. Abbas Bello, the head of the legislative drafting office in Niger State, Nigeria. Since 1991 scholars from Cyprus, Hungary, Eritrea, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, and Pakistan have trained with the Center for periods of up to three months in residence.

In response to increasing demand for training of legislative drafters, TPLC developed the International Legislative Drafting Institute in 1995. The Institute is a two-week summer program that responds to the worldwide demand on legislative drafting personnel for new laws supporting the emergence of free market economies and democratic forms of government. The Institute has graduated hundreds of legislative drafting personnel from more than 8`5 jurisdictions around the globe. The homepage (http://www.law.tulane.edu/ildi/) contains more information about this annual training event.

The Public Law Center has also organized several successful training events in distant locations:

1. South Africa—In August 1997, TPLC conducted a four-day "Workshop in Legislative Drafting" in Johannesburg, South Africa for legislators and drafting personnel from various provincial parliaments, the Ministry of Justice, and law schools. TPLC returned to South Africa for presentations on legislative drafting and transparency laws as part of an October 1997 workshop on legislative drafting in Bisho, South Africa for members of the Eastern Cape Legislature, legal advisors, and law school faculty.
2. Dominican Republic—The Public Law Center co-hosted in March 1997 a two-week judicial reform conference in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. for a delegation of nine judges and judicial reformers from the Dominican Republic. A follow-up visit took place in March 1998 in Santo Domingo, where judges, law professors, and TPLC staff from New Orleans made presentations to a conference of approximately 150 judges and judicial reformers on such topics as judicial disciplinary procedures, public defenders, alternative dispute resolution, and citizen participation in the judicial reform process.
   
   In December 1998, in response to a request from the Comisionado de Apoyo a la Reforma y Modernización de la Justicia of the Dominican Republic, TPLC conducted a four-day conference on law revision and codification for eight members of the Comisionado. The conference, which took place in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, allowed the participants to meet with law professors at three different law schools—Tulane, LSU, and Loyola. The participants also met with the U.S. Attorney, two Federal Bankruptcy Trustees, a U.S. Magistrate Judge, several state Criminal Court Judges, representatives of the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office, members of the Louisiana Law Institute, and numerous private practitioners.
   
   In 1999, TPLC conducted the first segment of a two-part training event on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). A group of twelve participants from the Dominican Republic, representing judges, district attorneys, NGOs, and the Comisionado, visited Louisiana and Texas for a two-week study tour. In phase two of the program, TPLC led a delegation of seven speakers to the cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago where they conducted two-day conferences on ADR in February and March 2000 with more than 200 people attending in each city. TPLC staff met with representatives of the Supreme Court and Congress.
3. Moldova—In September 1998, the Republic of Moldova hosted a TPLC training event in techniques of good legislative drafting practice, ethical concerns, and transparency issues. The four-day program was conducted for 45-50 drafters from the Ministry of Justice, the Parliament, and other governmental offices.
4. Georgia—In December, 1999, TPLC staff conducted a weeklong training event in public law legal drafting for legislative drafting personnel from the Parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court, and other offices of government.
5. Bulgaria—In November 2000, the Center was invited by the Local Government Initiative Program in Bulgaria to conduct training seminars on techniques of legislative drafting, needs assessment, determining interrelationships between levels of government, and public participation in Sofia and Plovdiv.

The Training Venue

TPLC's training is valuable and relevant to participants from both civil and common law jurisdictions. Louisiana’s Civil Code system, unique among the 50 states, puts us in step with a majority of the world's legal systems. And the Center’s two host law schools, Loyola and Tulane, are internationally recognized for their comparative legal studies, maintaining both common and civil law scholars on their faculties. The two law schools boast library resources of more than 700,000 books and over 2,000 periodicals. Their state-of-the-art video and computer resources are also available, as needed, for training.

Louisiana is an appropriate locale for international training because of its rich and diverse mix of culture, races, and ethnicity. Its judiciary may have more judges of African-American descent per capita than any other state in the nation—demonstrated by New Orleans’ Civil District Court bench, which consists of a majority of African-American judges. New Orleans has the largest Honduran population in the United States and many other ties to Caribbean and Latin American cultures, arising from its port and the City’s lengthy history of trade with Central America. Louisiana’s Cajun culture derives from the state’s French heritage. In addition, Italians, Germans, Irish, and many other nationalities have contributed to Louisiana’s diverse multi-cultural mix.