Today consisted of two interesting and informative professional meetings - the first meeting, shown above, was with the faculty and students of a private law school in Phenom Penh. The students were, as students are wont to be everywhere, enthusiastic, curious and, well, quite cute. In addition to their professor giving us a primer on Cambodian law, the students were quite curious about American law.
The second, shown above, was with the Cambodian Bar Association. There are 712 lawyers in the entire country (there are more than that in the men's room at the Wisconsin Bar at times).
Their challenges are immense, including a civil code adopted in 2007 but, for reasons which are not clear, is still not implemented. One of the bar association members actually practices family law and we able to answer many of our questions.
Although Cambodian law in general and family law in specific, is in its infancy, these meetings with lawyers, professors and students trying to establish a rule of law was incredibly encouraging. There are a lot of people who are trying to create a legal system from infancy. While the difficulties are staggering, they have made great progress.
After the meetings, we held our farewell dinner and thanked Shiv, our tour manager. A lot of us would like to be part of a People-to-People to his home country, India, with Shiv and he invited us to his home if we do so!
This will be my last blog "in country". Tomorrow, we leave in the morning for the long, long trip back. As usual, I will do a summary of final thoughts when I'm back in the states.
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