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10 Things You Should Know About Attending an International Judicial Education Meeting
by W. Milt Nuzum, Director, Supreme Court of Ohio Judicial College

Most of us fit into one of two categories. At least half of us are in the “homebody” category. We like going home at night to sleep comfortably in our own beds knowing that we will wake up safe and warm with a good homemade breakfast and the local newspaper waiting for us. We look forward to a fulfilling day of work surrounded by colleagues who care about us and our family members who love us. The remaining half of us fall into the “I like home but I might be missing something” category.That is where I find myself.

We too like home, our colleagues and families, but not enough to forego risking the inevitable discomforts and hoped-for rewards that come with hopping on a plane and going to some distant place to seek the adventure of experiencing a new culture. I just rewarded/punished myself with such an experience by attending the International Organization of Judicial Training (IOJT) meeting in Sydney, Australia. Before you go too far, I want to assure you that IOJT was on the reward side of that slash in the previous sentence. Getting there and back was on the punish side. Here are the 10 things you need to know:

1. One does not “hop on a plane.” While this is an expression as old as airline travel, keep in mind that you have to get to a busy airport and find a parking place at least two hours before you are scheduled to depart. Your bag has to weigh less than 50 pounds. However, it must be packed to keep you fit to appear in formal and informal sessions for up to two weeks half way around the world in another hemisphere where it is spring when you arrived and fall when you left. You must remember to get your passport AND visa well in advance. Then you have to not break a sweat or look shifty eyed while going through (1) immigrations, (2) customs and (3) airport security. By the way, remember to wear socks without holes in them. When you make it to your departure gate, the plane will inevitably be delayed. You will find yourself exhausted deciding whether you need a stiff drink of expensive liquor or a shot of caffeine at Starbucks while you are waiting for the boarding announcement. When they actually call your flight, you most assuredly will not be able to find your boarding pass. If you are like me you will find it in the inner lining of your ball cap because you did not want to wrinkle it while carrying your Starbucks coffee. You then find that you actually shuffle onto the plane. There is no hopping while shuffling. You will eventually find your seat only to discover that you are the only person on the plane who actually checked in a bag. Everybody else, including the 11 seatmates in your row carried theirs on leaving you with no place to put your backpack except on your feet for the 14 hour trans-Pacific flight. Your adventure has started.
2. Modern airplanes are not designed for your comfort unless you are willing to add a second mortgage to your home to fly in first class. Assuming you are not willing to do so (as I am not), you then have the joy of becoming well acquainted with your fellow coach class passengers. The person in front of you will lean the seat back leaving you with about 8 inches of living space for the next 14 hours. You cannot sit for 14 hours without going to the bathroom unless you have a very elastic bladder. I do not. You will arise and visit the lavatory. God forbid you have claustrophobia. When you return to your seat, you discover that the guy in front of you who leaned back to sleep in your lap has awakened and is waiting for you to return. He wants to know if you found his false teeth. You assure him that the only teeth you have are your own. He looks at you suspiciously like you are probably lying, but has to accept your word for it. This actually happened to me. It had a happy ending. When we arrived in Sydney, the flight attendant announced as we were pulling up to the gate that if anybody lost their false teeth, that person could claim them at the rear galley. The fellow was so happy; he jumped up and hit his head on the overhead luggage compartment yelling, “They found me choppers! They found me choppers!” All I could think about was what were his choppers doing in the galley where my food was prepared?
3. Hotels outside the United States and Canada are different. Here in North America you can get a King or Double room. Everywhere else you can get a King or Twin room. I spent an hour on the website trying to figure out whether the Australian definition of twin was the same as our double (meaning two queen size beds) or did they, in fact, mean two twin beds. After all, Australians have a very British heritage. In Australia, you take the lift, not the elevator. You have mates, not friends. You have “no worries” in Australia. They also drive on the wrong side of the road. In any event, the size of the bed made a difference to me because my wife and adult son accompanied me on the trip and we planned to share the room. I decided to forego an expensive international call to get a clear answer to this question deciding that, “twin,” was the Australian English language equivalent to our, “two doubles.” I was wrong. Needless to say that my wife, son and I slept less comfortably than I expected. This is a good segue to the next topic.
4. Sleep is no problem when you are 15 time zones away from your home. The only problem is that you are sleepy when you need to be awake and vice versa. Drugs can help but not a good idea when you are going to make a presentation to a distinguished audience of judges and judicial educators who may or may not speak your version of the English language. We now arrive at another segue.
5. The IOJT did an excellent job of providing translators for the plenary sessions. For non-English speakers, they have these cool headphones that enable the wearer to look good and understand the speaker in any number of native tongues. All presentations were made in English so I could understand just fine but I did not look cool without a headset. I succumbed to the temptation to put fashion above understanding by putting on a headset to look cool. Understandably, since I am a monolingual American, I had no clue about what was going on around me. I finally and reluctantly went back to my naked ears and found that I learned some things I did not know. Here we arrive at yet another segue.
6. The IOJT agenda was full of useful sessions applicable to a U.S. judicial educator. Two of them featured me as a speaker. I learned what I already knew about learning. I highly recommend teaching if you want to learn something really well. However, by listening to the other presenters, I was fascinated to learn that the problems of the judiciary and judicial educators around the world are not so much different from our own. I even learned that judicial educators in five countries on three different continents with vastly different forms of government are collaborating using technology to develop courses for delivery to judges in each of those five countries. As I thought about how that type of collaboration breaks down cultural barriers, I was extremely impressed.
7. If I walked away from IOJT with nothing else, I walked away with a network of new acquaintances who are interesting and influential people in the world. There were judicial educators, judges, Supreme Court justices and chief justices from states, provinces and countries on every continent except Antarctica at this conference. In my life, I have found that developing and using a network of friends inevitably leads to good things and success.
8. IOJT reinforced for me that the things that unite us as people far outweigh the things that separate us. Here is just one example. There was a terrible tragedy in Iraq that occurred while the conference was underway. There was an attack on the Iraqi Ministry of Justice Building in which many innocent people and employees of the court were killed. The Chief Justice of the Iraqi Supreme Court and two of his colleagues were in attendance at the IOJT meeting. We united as attendees from around the world in one group to convey our heartfelt condolences to these gentlemen who lost friends and colleagues in that senseless bombing.
9. The foregoing tragedy illustrated for me that serving as a judge or judicial educator requires extreme acts of bravery in many places in the world. We are accustomed to metal detectors in our own judicial buildings in the U.S. We have had our own senseless tragedies, but working in countries where political unrest and terrorism is the rule rather than the exception gives one pause to think what it would be like to live under the pressure serving justice on a daily basis knowing that your life could be taken at any moment. There are some very courageous people in our profession.
10. Despite the annoyances inherent in travel, it is a life enriching experience to attend a conference where you meet people from different cultures to exchange ideas and realize that we are not so different from one another and that we strive for common goals.

My advice is to love your home but make sure you don’t miss something. Buy a travel guide. Make sure you know which snakes and spiders will kill you and where the crocodiles lurk. Then shuffle onto a plane and get out there to seize the day. Make some new friends and return with some good stories to tell. Who knows, they might invite you to come back.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Milt Nuzum, Director of the Supreme Court of Ohio Judicial College, represented NASJE recently at the IOJT meeting in Sydney, Australia. Here are the materials from his presentation:
1) Distance Learning for Judges (PDF)
2) Education and Training of Long-Serving Judges (PDF)

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