Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

October 9, 2003

It wasn’t until law professor Elena Baylis traveled to Ethiopia last year that she decided she wanted to become an academician

web one on one:baylisSome jerk lights a squib and throws it into a crowded marketplace. (A “squib” being a crude precursor of an M-80, the kind of firecracker that can blind, burn or deafen.)

A guy in the crowd catches the squib, sees its sizzling fuse and tosses it into the air, hot potato-like. Several more people juggle and volley the squib until, inevitably, it explodes and hurts somebody — who files a lawsuit.

But who should be liable for paying damages? The jerk who threw the explosive into the crowd? Or the person who last touched it before it blew up and injured the plaintiff?

Such was the basis of Scott v. Shepherd, a.k.a. the Squib Case of 1773.

“If you don’t know about the Squib Case, you really haven’t been to law school,” Elena A. Baylis tells the first-year Pitt law students in her torts class.

 

It was a landmark case in English tort law, Baylis explains, because the court ruled, for the first time, that a defendant could be held responsible not just for “direct actions” (personally assaulting somebody, for example) but also “continuing actions” resulting from an initial act such as throwing a dangerous explosive into a crowd of people.

“But that creates another problem, right?” Baylis asks her students. “Where do we decide that these continuing actions stop?”

Baylis poses the question with the enthusiasm of a reality-TV junkie wondering aloud who’s going to nail the millionaire bachelor or get thrown off the tropical island.

Torts (“when things go wrong and somebody sues somebody else, who then has to pay,” as Baylis colloquially defines them outside of class) are a required part of every law school’s curriculum and can be dreary stuff. But Baylis doesn’t view torts that way.

“A torts course can be a lot of fun to teach because it’s all about these strange cases,” she says. “The weirdest things happen, the most peculiar accidents.”

Baylis, who joined the Pitt law faculty this fall, clearly loves teaching: shaking the dust off centuries-old legal cases, crafting Socratic questions that encourage students to think for themselves, intentionally presenting weak arguments to goad students into challenging her and honing their analytic skills.

So, it’s surprising to learn that it wasn’t until Baylis traveled to Ethiopia last year that she decided she wanted to become an academician at all.

A 1998 graduate of Yale Law School, Baylis clerked for a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles and worked for Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C., handling international law and civil litigation matters. But she grew tired of working on litigation rather than gaining first-hand knowledge of other countries’ legal systems, her chief professional and academic interest.

Baylis half-heartedly began interviewing for faculty jobs two years ago, just to explore university work as a career option. After the first couple of interviews, though, she decided that she wanted to do international law — ideally, immersing herself in a foreign legal culture — before settling down as a professor, so she dropped out of the interviewing process.

But Baylis’s name remained on the national list of candidates for faculty positions. So, when the University of Alabama’s law school went searching for possible participants in a collaborative program with a new law school in Ethiopia, Alabama contacted Baylis.

“It was a chance to go someplace that I knew next to nothing about and learn about a whole new legal system,” Baylis recalls. “I decided that this was the chance I’d been waiting for.”

Arriving in February 2002 in the northern provincial capital of Mekelle, a city of 150,000 where donkey carts jostle for space in the streets with cars and buses, Baylis encountered a legal system very different from that of the United States. Ethiopia is a civil law country where the system is based on statutes and regulations, in contrast to American law (and U.S. legal education) which focus on cases and court decisions.

Another cultural difference: While students in American law schools expect to be grilled in class, Ethiopians are accustomed to silently taking notes while professors lecture.

“Here at Pitt, I lecture occasionally but mainly the students are expected to provide the information in class, based on the subject and their assigned reading,” Baylis says. “I’m always challenging them and encouraging them to challenge me, so it leads to a less deferential atmosphere than you would see in a typical Ethiopian classroom.”

Baylis strove to make her classes in Mekelle atypical. “At first, the students there were reluctant to answer questions,” she recalls. “On the other hand, they were very enthusiastic about debating and giving their opinions about the subject matter, especially in my constitutional law course, which focused on human rights provisions of the Ethiopian constitution. Students got into the most amazing arguments, largely, I think, because the classroom provided a neutral setting so the discussion wasn’t perceived as being personal or political.”

Prior to her Ethiopian experience, Baylis says, “I knew enough about teaching to know that I didn’t hate it. But once I got up in front of those students in Mekelle, I realized that I loved that interplay in the classroom.”

Baylis was keenly aware that the 65 students in her two courses would, soon after graduating, represent a large proportion of all the lawyers and judges in Ethiopia, a country that has been struggling since 1991 to build a democracy from the ashes of a failed socialist regime.

“No matter what you think about lawyers, there are just not enough of them in Ethiopia to go around,” Baylis says. “Before Mekelle’s law school opened, there had been only one other law school in the entire country. That school had been around for about 40 years and was producing about 65 graduates a year in a country of 65 million.

“In the United States, a lot of people would be happy to take all of the lawyers out in a boat and dump them in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was nice to be in a place where there is actually an urgent need for lawyers.”

While in Ethiopia, Baylis interviewed judges and other government officials about the country’s reforms. This work culminated in an interview with the president of Ethiopia’s supreme court (recently published in The Green Bag, an independent legal journal) and a second article, still in draft form, proposing a quasi-legal system for resolving ethnic conflicts, adopted from a system being tried out in Ethiopia.

Last spring, Pitt was looking for a junior faculty member who specialized in international comparative law, and Baylis by then was searching for just such a position. She had heard good things about Pitt’s law school but didn’t have high expectations about Pittsburgh when she flew here last December for her job interview.

Although her father had been born in Wilkinsburg and one of her grandmothers was from Forest Hills, Baylis had grown up in Michigan and knew little about Pittsburgh except the old stories about steel mills and darkness-at-noon. Driving from the airport toward Downtown, she noticed little but the traffic-clogged Parkway West, billboards and non-descript trees.

“Then I drove through the Fort Pitt Tunnel,” Baylis recalls, beaming, “and suddenly the view was just — spectacular. I had been envisioning some rambling steel town but this was so beautiful, with these amazing hills and bridges and rivers.”

And then Baylis reached Oakland and beheld….the skyscraper main building of Moscow State University. Or at least, to her, that’s what the Cathedral of Learning eerily resembled. (As an undergraduate, Baylis had participated in two study-abroad programs at Moscow State.)

“I thought I was having some bizarre, sleep-deprivation hallucination!” jokes Baylis, whose office affords a splendid view of the Cathedral.

Joining the law faculty here “was great for me because Pitt has a very sophisticated program” in international and comparative law, Baylis says. “I’ve walked into a situation with built-in mentors, with some fantastic scholars and teachers. The professors here are constantly winning teaching awards. I’m sort of biding my time before I ask if I can sit in on their classes.”

When she does, Baylis may be careful to clarify that she’s a fellow professor. Even wearing a black power-suit, the petite, 31-year-old Baylis looks younger than some of her own students, and a few of her older colleagues have mistaken her for one. “Of course, I’m old enough now to appreciate being mistaken for a student,” she says, with a laugh.

Baylis is creating two new courses that she plans to teach next term: “Crimes Against Humanity” and “Comparative Law: New Democracies in Transition.”

The former, a seminar for a dozen students, will examine the successes and failures of tribunals ranging from the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders, to the ongoing international criminal tribunal for ethnic cleansing crimes in the former Yugoslavia, to domestic “truth and reconciliation” commissions (emphasizing reconciliation of enemies rather than criminal punishment) that have functioned in Argentina, Rwanda and South Africa.

Part of this course will deal with America’s ambivalence toward international law. “The United States has a history of being very much in favor of international courts and tribunals, and international treaties and conventions — until the time comes to sign them or participate,” Baylis points out.

“We don’t want to be bound by international rules,” yet often it’s been America that has served as the cop hauling defendants into international courts, Baylis notes. “In the case of Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing, for example, it was threats to cut off U.S. aid that eventually convinced Yugoslavia to disgorge its defendants,” she says.

— Bruce Steele                            

 

 

Filed under: Feature,Volume 36 Issue 4

Leave a Reply