Today, I received notification that my school is funding me to spend eight weeks doing a research project in Strasbourg, France!
I still don’t entirely believe that this is happening, because it seems absurd to me that Northwestern is willing to give me almost $4,000 to go interview expert witnesses and observe trials for two months. Which I guess brings me to what my project is. It’s formally titled L’Expert Judiciaire: Examining the Safeguards Against Bias in Expert Witnesses in France and the United States, and basically means that I will be comparing the laws regarding expert witnesses in Strasbourg. I’ve observed a lot of trials in the United States, so I’m very interested to see the differences in French procedure (and will probably write nice long blog posts on the subject periodically, see my post on the Danish prison for an example). And ideally, this research will carry over into my Legal Studies thesis for senior year.
Anyway. I will be traveling in Europe for a total of about 10 weeks this summer, which means I will be resuming activity on this blog! In the meantime, I guess I need to figure out some logistics and increase the amount of time I devote to studying French 🙂
Au revoir!