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Moral leadership is focus of new publication by Penn Law’s International Programs office

November 27, 2019

Justice Khampepe of the Constitutional Court of South Africa with Penn Law student interlocutors.
Justice Khampepe of the Constitutional Court of South Africa with Penn Law student interlocutors.
Penn Law’s Office of International Programs has released the publication, “Bending the Arc of the Moral Universe: Three Essays on Moral Leadership.”

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean for International Programs

Penn Law’s Office of International Programs has released the publication, “Bending the Arc of the Moral Universe: Three Essays on Moral Leadership.” The publication features the essays “25 Years After Apartheid: Looking to the Past; Looking to the Future,” by Justice Sisi Khampepe of the Constitutional Court of South Africa; “Diaries from the Field: Children Who Were Soldiers,” by former United Nations Under Secretary General Radhika Coomaraswamy; and “Womenʼs Leadership in Law and Foreign Policy,” by former U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO Crystal Nix-Hines.  

Radhika Coomaraswamy’s “Children Who Were Soldiers: Diaries from the Field,” and Justice Sisi Khampepe’s “25 Years after Apartheid: Looking to the Past; Looking to the Future,” are two separate but interconnected reflections about conflict and the complex narrative of the potential of law and legal institutions to strengthen restorative justice.

The third paper by Ambassador Nix Hines examines the role of a disrupter in legal settings: “How can we do that? With deliberate intention. Even the smallest stones disrupt the surface of water, and if a single stone’s disruption is mirrored by more and more stones, the face of the water will, eventually, change,” Nix Hines writes.   

These profoundly moving meditations by three recent speakers at the law school are reminders to a diverse community of our connective tissues - grounded in the rule of law- and ways to move forward, even when the past is unalterable.