By JODI SOKOLOWSKI
Buffalo Law Journal

Inspired in part by an advocacy program at the University at Buffalo Law School, Maia Jaliashvili plans to someday open a domestic-violence clinic in her native country, the Republic of Georgia.

UB Law professors Isabel Marcus and Suzanne Tomkins are helping Jaliashvili and others to raise awareness about domestic-violence advocacy through Domestic Violence: Different Voices, a network linking scholars, nonprofit organizations and the courts. The program brings young lawyers from around the world on fellowship to UB Law to learn about the domestic-violence intervention system in the United States.

Jaliashvili was the first recipient of the law school's International Visiting Scholar fellowship, and spent the fall 2007 semester here. She said participating in UB Law's Women, Children and Social Justice Clinic, taking classes on family law and visiting agencies that provide services addressing domestic-violence situations allowed her to connect theory with practice. The young lawyer met with social workers at the Erie County Family Justice Center and judges in the state's Integrated Domestic Violence Court, and visited Haven House, a shelter for domestic-violence victims.

"The clinic let me understand the problem as part of the whole system and learn the ways of dealing with it from different kinds of (perspectives)," Jaliashvili wrote in an e-mail. Marcus said she took a salary reduction to help cover the fellowship and hosted Jaliashvili during her visit.

Not only are the international visitors learning about the American legal system, but UB Law students are being exposed to issues and solutions from other parts of the world, said Tomkins, director of the WCSJ clinic, which Marcus believes to be the only one of its kind in the nation.

As a lawyer working for a human-rights watchdog organization, the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association in Tbilisi, Georgia, Jaliashvili is now sharing what she learned with the legal community there and is applying her new skills.

Shortly after returning home, she was asked to assist a prosecutor representing a Peace Corps volunteer based in Georgia who alleged that she was raped.

"Rape and domestic violence are very subversive topics in patriarchal societies like Georgia because they challenge the way in which the state handles the most common forms of crime against women - by ignoring, dismissing or minimizing them," Marcus said.

Marcus and Tomkins want to tell the world how, through a grass-roots approach, violence against women can be addressed.

"They're not just trying to export a package and plug it in, but rather design a concept to what will fit culturally and legally in their own communities," said Erie County Family Court Judge Hon. Lisa Bloch Rodwin.

Marcus and Tomkins created the eight-week certificate program after Brazilian prosecutor Eduardo Machado came to UB last year to study ways to increase the effectiveness of a recently adopted domestic-violence law in Brazil. After Tomkins visited Brazil in February, finding an overwhelming need for advocacy and services there, the two professors decided to continue and expand the program.

"Our goal is to create a network of practitioners in various parts of the world who have had the opportunity to think about how to construct the most effective responses to domestic violence in their countries," Marcus said.

The program is seeking people who work in the field to speak to or host students as well as donations to bring two prosecutors from Brazil and three women's-rights lawyers - from Azerbaijan, Poland and Serbia - to UB Law as visiting scholars this fall.

"Until we can get a foundation grant, which we have to show success (to get), we need help financially or (for people to) just become involved," Marcus said.