Season 1: Episode 9: Ophelia Kemigisha

A Human Rights Lawyer from Uganda

How to succeed in law school for internationally trained lawyers?

Ophelia Kemigisha, a human rights lawyer from Uganda is known for her activist work in feminism and LGBTQ rights. Like every law student, she spends most of her time reading cases. What surprises her about the reading and writing in law school is that cases you read are so convoluted yet you are expected to write something so simple and concise. How is her biggest takeaway about reading and writing from law school in the U.S.?

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Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Kampala, the capital city of a small East African country called Uganda. I've been there for most of my life. I was born and raised and studied and worked there for almost all my life.

Why did you choose to study law?

In Uganda, the law degree starts from undergraduate. I chose law because it seemed like a good choice for a smart person. I don't think I went into the law intentionally to be a lawyer. I always imagine that lawyers you show up in court and make arguments but I found that like studying law opened up so many different things for me to do and it's been a very interesting journey and a really fun one.

What language(s) do you speak?

I grew up speaking Banyankore, which is my native tongue. My dad had the rule of no English in the house. Uganda was colonized by the British. So the official language there is English. So we spoke English in school and I learned English from a very early age may be three years old. I also learned how to speak Luganda, which is the kind of the main language spoken in the capitol. I learned a bit of French. I can hold up a brief conversation in French.

What do you do as a lawyer in Uganda?

I'm a human rights lawyer. And I started my career in the human rights organization where I worked briefly as an intern when I was still a student, and obviously got hooked. I did a bit of the nonprofit work, running projects and but mostly my day-to-day work really was providing legal support to different kinds of activists, human rights defenders, journalists, just showing up in the police to bail people out and filing cases, we used to think about strategic cases to advance human rights. And then after that, I joined feminist Pan African organization, where I worked to build capacity of lawyers across the continent to do strategic litigation for LGBT rights.

What is the most interesting and meaningful part of your job?

The most meaningful thing was just helping out one person, just being able to show up in a police station to help someone feel less intimidated by the law and to feel less scared. It was just being able to give people advice, and you translate all the stuff that I spent a lot of time reading and studying into everyday language for somebody to make use of. I helped the activists who were apprehended in the Women’s March in Uganda. Our Women’s March was inspired by the movement in the U.S. But we really the Women's March was organized to respond to a series of homicide that were happening in the country. By the time we held the match, at least 20 women had been found killed in very gruesome manner near Kampala. And we were really concerned that the police was not responding with the urgency that we thought they needed to respond with. We wanted to have this public action to say women's lives matter. It is important for these investigations to be ramped up and for us to have some kind of plan because the narrative from the police and the media was that these women are sex workers. Maybe they have different boyfriends. And we really wanted to put across the message that women's lives are important. So that's why we organized the match.

What legal TV shows or movies informed your impression of the legal profession in the U.S.?

I recently started watching The Good Wife. I would say that it is the best drama ever exist in the history of dramas. I remember being struck by how involved the judges were. I thought of the American legal system as dramatic. When the judges were involved in the cases compared to ours where the judge just sits up there being very quiet. They just takes notes and you can't tell if you're doing a good job or not. And then at the end you just see a judgment come through.

Can you describe your experience studying law in the U.S. as a lawyer from Uganda?

It was more difficult than I had anticipated. I thought I've been speaking English since I was three years old, it wouldn't be a big deal. I was surprised by how different it was, despite that we are both common law systems. I was surprised by the ways that the rules are applied differently. I found the ruling is more straightforward in Uganda. The reasoning here is much longer and more rigorous. I had a hard time making sense of it. I remember like having like three weeks into school, randomly understanding what a case was, I was like that's what it just made sense. It's an interesting mix in terms of reading cases and learning to write like a lawyer in the U.S. You need to read difficult things and then write simple things.

The reason I think is that because the US system has been established over a longer period of time, there was a lot of things that was shorthand. There are things that judges say that they've had been established for generations, and there is no effort to kind of describe them. Because the Uganda constitution was promulgated in 1995. When judges would be writing, they would make the effort to describe legal concepts from the beginning.

Is there any interesting stories you encountered since you arrived in the U.S., due to linguistic/cultural/social differences?

People are surprised by my accent. I've gotten comments about my accent sounding British, which of course it does. So I was I was at an event and I asked someone where that “bin” was, And there was like the rubbish in the bin? You sound so fancy. At the same event, I asked for a “serviette”, a server and they were like, do you mean a napkin? I was like: Yes. A tissue. The person told me no tissues belonged in the bathroom.

What would you like to get out of your legal education in the U.S.?

The biggest resource that I've gotten from here, just being able to find people who do all kinds of legal work from financial transactions to human rights. It is also about the gravitas. At the law school, I studied there are the country’s greatest legal minds. I hope that it makes me a better lawyer and enables me to make more rigorous arguments in both legal and nonlegal spaces.

What are the most important things you have learned at law school in the U.S.?

Thinking like a lawyer and writing like a lawyer. What’s the issue? What's the rule? How does it apply? Why is it applied here in this way and hear in another way? Why is it different? It is about making sense of how the rules apply in real life.

What does an ideal professional life look like for you?

My ideal professional life is a life where I can make my legal knowledge useful to my activism work. As to my writing, I think I primarily think of myself as a writer, I think of the law as the place that I can. Writing is what I use to make sense of the world. The ideal professional life would be one that allows me to both use the law but also to write, perhaps as a professor or a judge.

How does your legal background impact your activist work?

Activists can be a bit ambivalent about the law. The law is a battleground. So much of our lives are informed by the law. And the law is being written and defined by the power structures. If activism is about challenging power, or about redistributing power, or about rethinking the way that power is distributed, then we need as many people in the law as we can get. Learning about the law and making sense of legal reasoning as a resource that I can provide to communities where I am an activist, especially feminist and LGBT communities.

Who’s your inspiration in the law?

Professor Sylvia Tamale. She's a feminist lawyer from Uganda. I am inspired by so much of her work on a range of issues. She has made an intellectual contribution to the feminist discourse. She also has excellent.

What are the top three things you recommend to bring from home when you come to the US to study law?

Physical pictures. At some point, I realized that my phone wasn't enough. It would have been good to have a picture of my mom somewhere. The second thing is spices. I think the food here is a huge adjustment and you can find spaces from home but sometimes they are not the same as what you're used to. The last thing I would say is millet flour. In our cuisine, we eat a lot of millet porridge and millet bread. When I was growing up my mom, my mom told me that it was like a taboo for a home to not have millet flour. You have to have it on hand at all times.