The Raymonde I. Paul Scholarship is awarded to students who intend to practice international Law.
Raymonde I. Paul Scholar Margaret Artz is one of two 2013 Vanderbilt Law graduates who will join Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer as an associate based in Frankfurt in September.
(The other, Tim Van Hal, will be based in both Frankfurt and London). The scholarship was endowed in 1981 in honor of the late Raymonde I. Paul, a pioneering international lawyer who helped found the International Federation of Women Lawyers. It is awarded to a student who plans to focus on international law and includes a fellowship with the Nashville Committee on Foreign Relations.
Artz’s interest in international law has roots in her early childhood in Lesotho in southern Africa, where her parents worked in development and education. After earning a degree in international affairs from George Washington University, Artz was an East Africa project assistant for the National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, and then moved to Tunis, Tunisia, to work as the coordinator of the American cultural center supported by the U.S. Embassy and an educational NGO. She became interested in earning a law degree during the year she worked in North Africa. “I saw the negative effects of a repressive, undeveloped legal system on people’s daily lives,” she said. “I wanted to learn how a well-established legal system works and reorient my development interest to focus on the rule of law.”
After meeting a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, when he delivered a presentation at the law school, Artz was offered an internship with the tribunal in summer 2011. “My work supported the defense team for the minister of the interior of the Republika Srpska,” she said. “It was a rare opportunity for a close look at the nascent field of international criminal law and to really examine my commitment to defense and the crucial part it plays in ensuring justice for leaders accused of committing atrocities.”
A course Artz took through the Vanderbilt in Venice program, International Commercial Arbitration, drew her to apply with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Her prior exposure to international arbitration issues and international legal experience from the previous summer helped Artz with her phone interview with attorneys in Freshfields’ office in Frankfurt, Germany. She spent summer 2012 there as an associate in the firm’s commercial arbitration group and will join the group as a full-time associate in 2013. Artz plans to take leave of absence in 2014-15 to clerk for Judge Kevin Sharp on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.