Lawyer - Stetson University College of Law

Destination: Cayman Islands
Thirty-two law students—including 19 from
Stetson—attended Stetson’s first winter-break program in
the Cayman Islands in January 2008.
Co-sponsored with the American and Caribbean Law
Initiative, the two-week program offered students the
chance to take two credit hours of courses in International
Ocean Law, Comparative Legal Systems of the Caribbean,
and Offshore Tax Havens and Financial Centers.
The classes were held at Cayman Islands Law School
in George Town, the country’s capital city and one of the
world’s premier international banking and investment
centers.
“We met several government officials, judges, queens
counsel, and advocates,” said part-time student Lisa Only.
“I had a great time.”
Like the London semester and Stetson’s summerabroad
programs, the Cayman Islands winter-break program
is open to visiting students from other American Bar
Association-accredited law schools.
Class trip leads student to research topic
Two summers ago, I enrolled in
a unique course at Stetson on the
“History of Civil Rights Law.” The
course was exceptional because it
included a directed learning component
that allowed students to travel, by bus,
to many cities and sites that played
an important role in the Civil Rights
Movement. We traveled to Atlanta,
Nashville, Montgomery, Birmingham,
Selma and elsewhere.
Our first stop was at the Mt.
Zion Baptist Church in Albany, Ga.,
which now houses a small, grassroots
museum. While there, we met Carol
Barner Seay. In the summer of 1963,
Carol was 13 years old, growing up in
Americus, Ga. Despite her youth, Carol,
like many other children, played an
intricate role in peaceful desegregation
protests and the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee’s “fill the jails”
campaign. During one such protest,
Carol and many of her friends—some
as young as 10—were arrested and
jailed in a dilapidated Civil War era
stockade in Leesburg, Ga. There were
more than 30 girls in total, all held in
a small, 12-by-40-foot cell, with no
running water or working toilet. The
girls slept on the stockade’s concrete
floors. For weeks, the children suffered
these conditions, without medical
treatment and, for a period of time,
without their parents knowing of their
whereabouts.
When I returned, I began
researching the legal avenues for
redress available for Carol and the other
girls, and found that there was but
one hurdle that prevented them from
bringing their otherwise valid claims all
these years later: expired statutes of
limitations.
My research challenging those
statutes will be published in a
forthcoming article in the Stetson Law
Review. On March 11, the Stetson
Law Review and Bush Ross P.A. cosponsored
a scholarship luncheon
dedicated to the topic. Carol and her
cousin, LuLu Westbrooks-Griffin, who
was also jailed, attended the event,
and we presented their story and my
research. The scholarship luncheon
allowed the use of storytelling to be
presented as a significant aspect of
legal research and writing, and was
an opportunity for me to share my
research with my student and faculty
colleagues.
—Graham Shaffer
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