FIFTEEN pre-selected professionals and students completed on Friday the three-week summer pre-law program 2002 at the House of Justice.
The chosen students graduated shortly after they finished the Justice Ramon G. Villagomez moot trial in the high court’s courtroom.
The participants received their certificates from the justices, law professor Edward J. Bronson of the California State University in Chico, acting NMC President Barbara G. Moir, and Senate Vice President Jose M. Dela Cruz, D-Tinian, who was acting governor on that day.
Chief Justice Miguel S. Demapan, in his remarks, congratulated the graduates and described them as “our commonwealth’s best pre-law participants.”
“These dedicated men and women have spent three weeks of their time undergoing intensive training to better prepare them face and survive the challenges of any U.S. law schools they will eventually matriculate,” said Demapan during the graduation ceremony at the Supreme Court.
Demapan also thanked Bronson and attorney Danielle Conway-Jones of the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law, for their patience and commitment in teaching the students. The two professors introduced the participants to the study of law and provided them practical law school experience, among other things.
Bronson has been to the commonwealth and other parts of Micronesia many times since the late 1970s. Conway-Jones was on Saipan in 2001 as a guest speaker at the Pacific Judicial Conference.
“The fruits of our hard work are now being enjoyed by us after more than 25 years of dedicated and sustained work by professors like Bronson and Conway-Jones,” the chief justice said.
The pre-law program was sponsored by the Supreme Court, Northern Marianas College, the local bar association, the Office of the Attorney General, the Rotary Club of Saipan and the NMI Council for the Humanities.
Board of Education spokesman Robert A. Myers Jr., one of the participants, told Variety that the program “truly benefits anyone who wants to go law school.”
“For any other students in the CNMI who are planning or thinking of going to law school, it’s a must,” said Myers, adding that they had learned a lot of the things that first year law students are going to experience with.
For Mona Celia R. Mercado, the three-week program was “intense, but very rewarding.”
Christine Juwelle Cunanan, the reigning Miss CNMI International, said the program was extremely intensive.
