Even though Mine Orer, LLM ’18, earned an undergraduate law degree while living in Turkey, it was her experience as a Michigan Law student that really opened her eyes to the possibilities of practicing international law. She is now applying her skills to a clerkship at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial body of the United Nations located in The Hague, the Netherlands.
For the next 10 to 12 months, Orer will work for the Hon. Dalveer Bhandari of India, one of the ICJ’s 15 judges. The court handles legal disputes between UN member states as well as requests for advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by UN organizations and agencies.
“It’s a generalist court,” Orer said. “As long as the court has jurisdiction, it can basically opine on any topic under public international law. So in that sense, I’ll be exposed to so many different areas of the law.”
She was drawn to the ICJ in hopes of seeing its work from a practitioner’s perspective.
“I want to be an advocate before courts and tribunals in my career, so being able to get into the minds of how the judges are thinking about these topics is exciting. I want to work more in the field of international arbitration, and a lot of these judges are working as arbitrators as well. So it’s a good way to think deeply about these international law topics.”
Orer’s path to the court
Orer traveled a less-typical path to the court than her US counterparts. She grew up in Turkey and studied law as an undergraduate at Koç University in Istanbul before doing a lawyer traineeship in Ankara.
But she often traveled to Michigan, where she was born and where her father was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting professor at Michigan State University.
When she decided to pursue her LLM, Michigan Law was the natural choice.
“Even from childhood, I remember visiting the Law Quad and fantasizing about coming here as a student,” she said.
While at Michigan Law, she immersed herself in classes with the goal of becoming an academic. But she quickly realized that international law wasn’t only for academics.
“I think my interest in the area of international economic law developed more during my time in Michigan,” she said. “My entry into that was through Professor [Steven] Ratner’s class on international investment law. So that’s where my focus has been—international trade, sustainable development, investment law, those types of topics.”
The time is right
After Orer earned her LLM, Michigan Law funded her three-month fellowship at the AIRE Centre, a human rights legal charity based in London.
She subsequently returned to the United States and interned and then clerked on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. It was then that she decided to get her JD at Georgetown University, which she followed by working in the trade and arbitration practice at Sidley Austin before deciding to apply to the ICJ.
While Michigan didn’t nominate her for the ICJ position (Georgetown did), she realizes the timing for such a clerkship wouldn’t have been right immediately after earning her LLM.
“I did so many other things in the meantime and developed my skills,” she said. “And now I feel like I’m in a much better position and more ready to take this on.”
Banner photograph: UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek. Courtesy of the ICJ. All rights reserved.