Proyecto ACCESO’s efforts are complemented by several other Latin American-focused programs at California Western, including:

ACCESO Capacitación offers the leading Spanish-language instruction in oral advocacy skills for lawyers from Central and South America. Top criminal defense attorneys from around the United States come together to help their visiting colleagues become more effective trial lawyers. More than 4,000 lawyers have received training since the program-originally called the Trial Skills Academy-was created more than two decades ago.

This past August, ACCESO Capacitación received a $2 million grant from the U.S. State Department to create and run a national moot court competition for Mexican law students. Mexico has more than 1000 law schools and much of the grant will go toward paying the travel expenses of the competing students as they progress through local and regional qualifying events, leading up to the national finals that will be held in Tijuana. In addition, an online Spanish language LL.M. in trial advocacy will be launched in 2014.

The American Legal Studies and Exchange Program is two-week series of courses for Brazilian lawyers in which they come to San Diego to learn about the American legal system, which is vastly different from their own Napoleonic-based system.

“The visiting lawyers not only get a good look at our adversarial system, they learn how to work more successfully at the international level where business and legal practices increasingly are based on a global marketplace,” says program director Carla McEwen, an attorney licensed in Brazil and the U.S.

BOB ROSS // RES IPSA ONLINE