By Browning Brooks

FSU Communications Group

The most extensive international volunteer project ever undertaken by the American Bar Association has taken another leap forward under the continued leadership of FSU.

Sometime next year, a new American graduate law program will be established in Eastern or Central Europe to augment professional training for lawyers who are laying the foundations of democracy in formerly Communist nations.

"Florida State should be extremely proud of this project," said Homer E. Moyer Jr., cofounder of the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) in 1990 with then-ABA President Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte.

At a recent conference at FSU, lawyers gathered to plan the new one-year law school, which will be heavy on commercial law.

CEELI, based in Washington, D.C., has grown from an altruistic idea to reality in some 20 countries where American lawyers help train, write laws and design new legal systems.

CEELI project volunteers from throughout the United States, who receive no compensation, have been witnesses to extraordinary change in countries undergoing constitutional and political transitions: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The premise behind CEELI is simple, said Executive Director Mark Ellis (a 1984 graduate of the FSU College of Law.) "Economic and political reforms can't endure in these emerging countries without a working, viable legal system to enforce the rule of law."

From bankruptcy reform in Bulgaria to constitutional drafting in Armenia, CEELI volunteers have been there to help in troubled times.

Many of the countries have no independent judiciary, no court systems as we know them, no law libraries, no organized law firms, no independent bar associations.

"The experience has an exhilarating effect on the attorneys," Moyer said. "They look at themselves and their own country through new lenses."

Donna Stinson had been a practicing attorney in Tallahassee for 20 years when she packed up her family in May 1993 and moved to Latvia to help draft and review new legislation, and to help develop the Baltic Judicial Association and a Latvian judicial training center.

"I was extremely well received at all levels of government from the prime minister on down," Stinson said.

When she returned to Tallahassee a year later, she signed up to work for FSU to help develop the fledgling law program abroad.

"It's hard," she said, "to go from building a democracy to billable hours."