 Okay, okay, we're back. We're live. It's the 4 o'clock rock here on a given Thursday, and I'm here with Shackley Rufero He's the chief judge retired of the Second Circuit Court in Maui, and he's on our board and comes to see us Mostly for board meetings or after a trip in this case It's both because he got back only a couple of weeks ago from China where he had a very interesting time We want to talk about that today. It was in Kunming, China Why did you go Shackley? I went to well every year I go and serve as a volunteer judge for the China rounds of the Jessup international law moot court competition, which is a worldwide competition about 90 countries participate each country has their own competition we do it in the United States as well, it's a huge competition and and You've been doing this a long time in many places about 11 years. Yeah, well and what is a moot court? Well, it's it's like moot court in law school, right? It's an appellate argument like an argument before the Supreme Court of Hawaii or the Intermediate Court of Appeals and in the case of the Jessup they have a Committee or law professor who puts together a really complex problem And that's given to the students and they have to learn to argue both sides Hmm and in China we had I think China's the largest program now They were 51 law schools participating and the top five were selected to go then to Washington DC and participate Right about now. Whoa, and I've also Served in the finals in Washington DC and also in Russia. Oh, you're a big part of this thing That's a really mean what kind of a what kind of a problem would you pose to Chinese students in Kunming? well, let me say the competition is all in English and in China the government very wisely in my opinion requires that college students learn English which has the result of making educational opportunities in the English speaking world available to Chinese students and many of them as you may know come here for LLM degrees and more and more JD degrees and And and because it's in English We can you know people like me can go and participate which I couldn't if it certainly couldn't if it was in Chinese Yeah, sure So can you give us some of the facts and the problems so we can sure appreciate its complexity? Yeah this year was was Usually there's four major issues and Just give you a general idea. They it's a very complicated fact situation But in this case it involved two nations one of which was more developed than the other and There was an animal called the caliph yak kind of a yak that migrated back and forth Across the boundaries of these countries in the northern country was a very primitive country that worshiped this yak and used all of all of the yak for food for religious purposes for shelter etc etc and a company in in the southern country They give these countries odd names and I can't start for me to remember the names Anyway, there's the southern country had spun off one of their government agencies that was involved in research and pharmaceuticals into a private corporation Somebody from that company went north and noticed that people who eat soup made out of the gallbladder of the caliph yak have great health and Decided to see if we could synthesize Whatever it was out of this soup that made people healthy and he found that there was a particular enzyme That yeah, I forget I have the Lustig enzyme. It's called and he created a medicine called Galvextra that turns out to be incredibly successful at treating Diabetes, so it's just true. No, no, this is one made up names. Well, I you know There may be germs of truth here and there, but yeah, the names are all made up There are yaks in I've seen the yaks in Mongolia and there were some some of the Judges kind of quibbled with it with the facts, you know, but it's just it's intended to raise complicated issues of international law one of them, for instance is Should the should the southern state be responsible for harming The people who rely upon the yak in the northern state even though they've spun this function of the Pharmaceutical function off into a private company. Are they responsible for that? For the harm caused by a private company and that's a whole issue of international law How interesting Four or five issues like that. They get really quite complicated. This reminds me of Something I read recently about the one belt one road initiative in China Namely that the Chinese have established a law school somewhere in the southwest of China To teach law students international law in all of the countries that One belt one road is supposed to pass through On the notion that the Chinese want to be familiar with international law with the laws of all those countries So that they can plan, you know good moves and so that they can you know defend their position If necessary as they build the infrastructure in one belt one road and this international View of things that you saw in jessup is it does suggest the same kind of international awareness absolutely and for instance After the competition is complete myself and a couple of other lawyers do an extra day of training for the The top teams on advocacy and one of the things I talked to them about it's basic common law evidence And how to use the concept of relevancy to decide what issues are what facts are important to support or not support particular issues and You know difference between direct and in circumstantial evidence Francis there are international law cases that actually say that If if the case is to be proven by circumstantial evidence then the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt And the student was arguing with me about that because I said well circumstantial evidence is entitled to this improve a fact Just it's just as direct evidence And I said well, I was probably a civil law judge who wrote that opinion He just he just felt that that wasn't a reasonable inference Didn't want to trust a certain circumstantial evidence, but that that kind of Yeah, it was great. Yes. So what's the role of somebody like yourself in a jessup competition? Well, we serve as the volunteer judges actually Put a Judges brief together for us But I usually take that in an outline of myself and use it as a checklist and because it's very complicated stuff and and a lot of International law is kind of what they call soft law Mm-hmm. It's a you know some committees draft report about such and such and may eventually become law or be adopted by the UN But it's it's tough to argue from things like that plus they have a lot of difficulty understanding how to argue from the case You know what what is it like? Princess, what is the holding of a case? They don't teach that concept apparently in Chinese law schools and so They do American I take it to just was also done the competitions were also held in this country. Yes Do American kids have an easier time of it? I? Don't think so. It's pretty complicated. Yeah. Well, it's not only complicated, but it's a worldview. It's a sort of thing looking over your own Boundary and trying to appreciate multinational litigation multinational issues Well, they might have an easier time because they learn the common law, you know Our common law system we in the case method and and started to size this and all those concepts that we're very familiar with they don't learn those Those concepts and at the end of the day you find that Chinese kids students law students who engage in the jessep say in China say in Kunming are pitted against American Competitors from the US. Well, they are when they come to the to the Well, they're matched up against teams from all over the world It's they have quite a few social Activities at the at the finals in Washington, DC as well So these people these these kids have a chance to network and and it's really quite an interesting program This is just if you know was a Harvard professor who was one of the drafters of the UN Charter That's great. That's great. It's a great program and then in China What's nice is that the professor who runs the program holds it Usually one year in Beijing at Renmin University and then the next year someplace else And that's why we're in Kunming this year and next year We're going to be in Hainan Island and as a result of participating. I've been to a number I've probably been in 15 or so of the major Are you unique or there are other Americans there? No, there are others and then there are people from all over the Russians people from Finland Australians people from Hong Kong all speaking English. Yes all dealing with the same fact pattern. Yes. Yes Well, it sounds like a great time because you get to meet people and you get to get to engage with them and And and bring these kids up as international kids Yes, and they're they're they're very hard-working students very very earnest about what they're doing great Well, you can one of the things they do is you can't actually Interact with them until the competition is over and they have the final closing ceremony Which I have a photograph of and then they have a big dinner And of course then you can sit with the students and they all want to ask you how did I do do you have any you know Suggestions and trying to remember who they are and of course if you've sat on about six of these things So a great fun make relationships that last forever. Yeah, it's very interesting plus in this case Since I knew we were going to be in Kunming I knew that that was the home of the flying tigers and that there was a museum there And so I made a special request to go a little early so that I could Go see the museum and and look around a little bit Which was what what what all the flying tigers flying tigers was an American volunteer group of pilots and mechanics and support people Who president Roosevelt? Before we were in the United States entered into World War two allowed to be created try and travel to China and Fight as a part of the national what's not the national is Chinese now the folks in Taiwan But at that time was Chiang Kai-shek was the head of the Nationalist Chinese Army and actually flew and fought the Japanese The actual fighting started slightly after Pearl Harbor But they were over there before and getting ready And they were they were flew for the Chinese Air Force for about seven months and very successful proved that the Japanese military machine could be stopped which up until that time like the German Army had been sort of rolling over everything in in Asia. Yeah, and Just slowed them down. Yeah, and the one thing I was very pleased to see is that the building that That the museum is in Is an older building that they preserved and it's and it has a sign outside that it's part of it The Chinese heritage is the Chinese heritage building or words of that effect What's being preserved and and the museum itself is very dignified and very nicely done. I think I was really pleased to see that I know you have photographs. Let's take a short break shackling, okay? We'll come back and we'll go through your your photographs that the flesh this out, okay We'll be right back with a fellow Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock Live from think tech Hawaii and on our show we talk about taking your health back And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is What we're going to be talking about whether it's spiritual health mental health fascia health beautiful smile health Whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of out and about where every other week Mondays at 3 we explore a variety of topics in our city state nation and world and Events organizations the people that fuel them It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome Studio here where we can get your ideas out as well So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha Okay, we're back with Shackler Rufero the chief judge retired of the second circuit court Who is an inveterate traveler and who is also an inveterate? Just a competition person who is for 11 years He's been involved in the just a competition which is a worldwide moot court competition this time He went to Kunming China learned a lot about the competition and about the flying Tigers too So we're going to look at your pictures Shackley. Let's see them. All right If you could put the first this is the map just to orient you here's China you have to kind of look in the Southwest Next to where Myanmar is today and those days it was Burma. That's where Kunming is I don't know if you can see that And that's where I was so you see Beijing is way up on the in the On the east coast of China So I flew actually to Korea and then way over to Kunming which is like another six-hour flight Well, China is a huge country Interesting thing about Kunming is it's it's actually at 6,000 feet above sea level But it must be kind of like Denver is about that high. Yeah, and is it near or part of the Himalayas? It's not too far away. I Wouldn't say it's close, but I'll Describe that a little bit in a minute, but you see it's close to India. Mm-hmm where the Himalayas are and Anyway, it's the clear blue skies beautiful weather I mean, it's it's the nicest city I've been in China and I've been in about 15 None of the pollution that you see in Beijing or Shanghai or those other cities. Okay next This is the all the students and all the all the international volunteer Judges and this is the Yunnan University Law School building. This is about an hour out of Kunming, China It's a huge Campus, which is about six years old And it holds a number of different colleges technical schools In fact, I bumped into a guy at breakfast one day who is Professor at the Stanford Medical School who was who was there with his lawyer Apparently working on some sort of deal at the technical school. They wouldn't tell us what it was next wait They're they've got they've got little White tight. What is that? Those are apparently that's the robe that international justice is where Looks like the Hague. I told him that we don't use anything fancy like that It's more like a high school high school graduation gun. Okay next these are more pictures. This is this is the three judge panel that we use To judge the competition and these would be all the young people who who were on the teams and Whenever I reside I always like to have everybody come up and take a photograph after it's after we're done and everybody gets to Have a photograph to take with them. So there's kind of a nice a nice thing to do. I think next These are all the people who did the extra training That I mentioned Let's see Between myself and the lady there is Professor Wenqiu Wenqi Shu. He's the head of the whole program in China. He's a senior professor at Renmin University The lady on his right It's Carol Kalinowski who was one of the founders of the China just a program and the lady next to her on her right is She's very interested. She's Chinese lady who was born in Vietnam Was a boat person with her family at the end of the Vietnam War Somehow she got to New York went to law school Now she teaches at a big university law school in China What a story and that men on her on her is Peter Ong. He's a lawyer from Singapore the lady with the purple scarf it is that is Is a law professor? She's from Inner Mongolia actually and she's a law professor at a big university in Beijing and the other gentleman with the cap is a lawyer from Malaysia who does a lot of Goes to a lot of moots throughout Asia. That's a that's a mixed group. Yeah, it's a great group of people actually next This is the the big sign they had up Let's see on my left is Yanadi Esikov. He's a he's a professor from Moscow and on my right Is Matti Jader. He's he's a lawyer from Finland and I don't I don't remember the names of the two ladies But just give you another idea of we're on the way to the closing ceremony there next This is the closing ceremony. They give you a little certificate to You know prove that you were there I guess I have a collection of those now men on the far right is a Our on the left of the photograph is a lawyer from Singapore. He's one of the sponsors Provides financial support and the men in the middle between he and I as a professor from Nepal That man do and I don't remember the names of the other folks although the lawyer on the far Right is one of the one of the big law firms in China that sponsors the program and that's the courtroom that we use That's their moot courtroom at the university. It's pretty nice with those big chairs. Yeah, next Oh Kunming is the largest flower market in Asia and I had occasion to go to it This is just a couple of examples of the kind of bouquets that you could buy there huge huge place with millions of flowers Next This is downtown Kunming and I happen to stumble across this is a Catholic church And I was pretty surprised to see that the Russian law professor Gennady actually inspected the place a little bit and and it said on the sign on the door that it was not actively Providing services, but that if you wanted to attend a service you could go to some other location But I thought it was really interesting to see a big Church like that with a big Christian cross right in the middle of a Chinese city these days. Yeah next This is the outside of the Flying Tigers Museum And you can see it's an older building and it says Flying Tiger Museum in Chinese and and the sign on the sign there Next I don't have too many pictures of the inside these are these are some friends This is inside the museum to give you an idea of what it looks like The man on the left is a Chinese lawyer in Kunming who I hosted here in Hawaii actually with another group of with the other a group of other Chinese lawyers to observe a jury trial and Is it our supreme court and so on and and I knew he lived there So I so I let him know and he came with his two folks from his From his staff and one I think the young man is his nephew and the young lady is on his staff She's in the process of coming to the u.s. To study actually speaks very very good English She's from in her mongolia. He's mongolian menchu Combination men shoes were the last emperors of china Next something These are the Flying Tigers the famous p-40 Curtis p-40 Kitty Hawk I guess they called him and they painted the the shark mouth on him And those became famous And they flew for as they say flew for china for seven months during the seven months period that they flew for china They shot down 296 japanese airplanes and lost 14 of their own pilots. So he shows you how successful they were next This is the berma road This is this is the road that runs from berma to china in the old days It's it's now been replaced by a highway. They tell me and it's called the stillwell highway Named in honor of general stillwell who was a head of us military forces in china during world war two and he was uh claire Now claire shunalt claire shunalt was the head of the flying tigers right right and Stillwell would have been claire shunalt shunalt's boss right once the americans came in What happened was is that the flying tigers flew for the chinese air force and and when After the us came into the war then we started sending us forces to that part of china And and the flying tigers those who wanted to stay some of them didn't were absorbed into the into the Army air core in those days and shunalt became a brigadier general He'd been he'd actually was a colonel who had retired And and had been working in china started up the flying tigers and then And then came back into the army air force great story, but but the Go to the next one, please This is another picture of the of the berma road There is a an area of the of the berma road called the solwene gorge, which is a I guess a mile deep gorge and part of the japanese Advance in indochina, which included vietnam and thailand and berma Was to come up the berma road and attack china from that direction They'd already occupied most of eastern china and they were bringing their forces up and And they they reached a place called the the solwene gorge And the flying tigers Bombed out the road and bombed their forces and stopped the advancement of the japanese military And it never entered china as a result of that so that they they proved that that We could defeat the japanese air force and we we stopped the japanese advancement in china And those were two great accomplishments of the flying tigers, and they were only in business for seven months You believe that And the gorge is in china rather than in french indochina. I think it's just inside berma The truth i'm not exactly sure. I can see an arrow there pointing to kunming It says bridges winding roads vulnerable targets for bombs Yeah, yeah, it might be might have been just inside china then you're right It's a solwene gorge is it it's called yeah next This is a called a bloodshed and What what the Clarish and alt Who was the head of the flying tigers did it's I guess he had these made I'm not sure whose idea it was and in chinese it says This this person they would sew these on their leather flying jackets and it says Words to the effect that this is a foreigner who's flying and helping china Against the japanese, please help him and this is signed by pappy boyington who was a very famous marine aviator who served for a while with the flying tigers he Went back to the marine corps. He was the commander of the of the black sheep squadron and he won the Congressional medal of honor ended up One of the highest scoring aces On the american side against the japanese and was and was shut down finally and served several years in the In a japanese prisoner of war camp very famous guy next These are the two the the bloodshed on the bottom is peppy boyington and the next one up is tex hill He wrote a good a book called god is my co-pilot about his experience as a pilot Flying supplies over the himalayan mountains and then also flying with the flying tigers and these are on display at the museum there next These are the patches of the us forces that succeeded the the flying tigers and These are just the patches and they're displayed on the wall as a part of the museum Which I thought was nice that that they recognized those organizations next now after after the The flying tigers had Served with the chinese air force and then and have been absorbed by the by the american forces President roosevelt decided he wanted to help do something to help the chinese Keep to keep them in the war against the japanese And so he authorized the use of the b-29 super fortress, which are these airplanes here Here they're flying now over japan. That's mount fuji in the background And they decided to to um because Except for the do little raid which actually didn't do much damage, but it was a great morale morale builder Um, we hadn't really attacked mainland japan and uh, roosevelt wanted to do that As soon as possible. So he he Ordered that there there'd be a b-29 bomber station in india and in china Not too far from kunming near a place called chendu is is one place they flew from So but but they had to in order to get there they had to fly over the himalaya mountains It was called flying the hump and they had to fly all the bombs all the airplanes all the supplies It was an enormous undertaking and there those were the days when You you did star shoots to to decide where you were. There was no gps or any of that stuff So you're a 21 year old guy flying over mount ebris to know on a dc3 Or a b-29 and they the the these things had very long range and they flew them for I forget it was it was um from june 1944 until january 1945 Uh, and by that time we had captured the mariana islands in the pacific And it was decided that the bomber should be stationed there because they'd be closer to Get japan because the the planes in china could only reach q-shoe, which is the southern island of japan Interesting and I think I have a map of that next uh next side, please Yeah, this shows you uh The bombing of q-shoe from the bases in china This is a map from the from the museum actually they they covered this part of the of our war effort as well So that you know the thing that really The point I like to make and that I was really impressed with is that even though there may be political differences between The leaders of our country in china today There's a lot of appreciation for what americans did during world war two to help the chinese people And that that I thought was pretty cool Yeah, and inherent in what you say is it's it's well worthwhile to go to china today To enjoy that relationship to build that relationship to be a citizen Diplomat to enhance that relationship, and that's what you do But it's more than you I think people in general should do that This is not a bad time to go to china. In fact, it's an important time to go to china I agree. I agree. Do we got some more pictures? I think that's the last one I I climbed this mountain It's called west mountain there where the friend and this guy Gentleman came up if you want to have his picture taken with me. He has a really cool guy He's he's 80 years old And I'm 76. So I thought we were the two oldest guys on the mountain that day Very nice man next And this is uh, this was the the interesting thing about yunnan provinces They say that there are 50 Different minority groups that live in yunnan province and they have this huge Park is what it is essentially and most of these groups are represented and and you can go and see displays of their crafts and food and dance and other cultural activities And this was just the entrance of the place and I I think that's the last slide So I was able to do quite a bit and that was thanks for my friend who um who Showed me around the last day made a long day, but it was worth it So you have a book on the table. What is that? This is a book about the flying tigers I knew I was going there. So I read the book and Got oriented a little bit. So I was Try to be prepared. It's um, let me just say it's sam k l e i n e r Kleiner Uh, and it's called the flying tigers the untold story of the american pilots who waged a secret war against japan Highly recommended. It's a good book Yeah, it was secret at the time, wasn't it? Yeah, it was and apparently it was never really documented Roosevelt kind of did it with a wink. Yeah So, uh, when are you going back when you're going back for jessip? When are you going to go back to china? Um, I'm not sure. I've uh probably go to mongolia in may and then Uh, I'm trying to apply to do some teaching maybe in a summer session in china. We'll see Wherever you go, um, whatever you do teaching a moot court or a combination You should come back and talk to us about it. Shackley. Okay, and I'll bring some more pictures. Please Shackley rafferl chief judge retired of the second circuit court who was An inventor at a traveler and a most interesting guest here on think tech. Thank you