Tracy Harris is a JURIST contributor and a third-year student at the Norman A. Wiggins School of Law, Campbell University, and served as a judicial clerk with the Supreme Court of Namibia this summer as part of the inaugural Zaytoun clerkship cohort.

This summer, the inaugural cohort of the Joseph E. Zaytoun International Judicial Clerkship Initiative completed eight-week placements in the chambers of the Supreme Court of Namibia, alongside sister placements in Ghana and Rwanda. The program, built by Campbell Law School Dean Rich Leonard on three decades of judicial-reform work across the continent, was named a 2026 Excellence in Innovation Award recipient by Insight Into Academia earlier this summer. The placements were its first real-world test: American law students working directly under sitting justices, including Deputy Chief Justice Petrus Damaseb and Lady Justice Esi Schimming-Chase, the first woman appointed as a permanent justice on Namibia’s apex court.

For an international audience, the significance is not simply that a US law school placed students abroad. It is what those students walked into: a constitutional court still actively deciding what its own body of precedent is, thirty-five years after independence.

Namibia’s 1990 Constitution created a Supreme Court that inherited, but was never meant to remain bound by, the Roman-Dutch common law and South African case law that governed the territory under apartheid-era administration. In the years since, the Court has been engaged in what Damaseb has himself described in his scholarship as an incremental dissociation from South African authority—a deliberate, case-by-case process of building a jurisprudence rooted in Namibia’s own constitutional text rather than in decisions imported from a legal system designed to serve other interests. The working research rule inside the Court’s chambers reflects that project directly: Namibian authority is consulted first and always; South African case law is persuasive only, reached for solely when no Namibian precedent exists.

That distinction matters beyond doctrine. In legal systems with settled, centuries-old precedent hierarchies, stare decisis functions mainly as a stability principle. In a court this young, choosing to rely on its own prior decisions rather than reaching for a colonial-era authority is also an act of institutional self-definition—evidence that the Court is the author of its own legal tradition rather than an extension of someone else’s. Placing foreign law clerks inside that process, rather than in a more settled judiciary, means those clerks are watching legal identity get built in real time rather than studying it after the fact.

As one of the clerks in this cohort, I can speak to what that looked like on the ground. Over eight weeks, our work included bench memoranda, draft judgments, and case research conducted on NamibLII, Namibia’s national case-law database, all cited under the Juta Style Guide used across southern African practice. We sat in on oral arguments before the Deputy Chief Justice’s bench and were, from the first week, folded into the Court’s day-to-day life rather than kept at arm’s length as visiting students. That access is not incidental to the program’s value. Understanding how a constitutional court reasons its way toward jurisprudential independence requires more than reading the resulting judgments; it requires sitting with the people writing them while they decide which precedent to trust.

The broader rule-of-law implication is one worth watching closely. Judicial capacity-building programs between US institutions and African courts are frequently framed as one-directional: “developed-world” expertise flowing outward. This program inverts that framing. The learning here ran the other way: American students absorbing lessons about what it takes to construct an independent judiciary from a court doing that work deliberately and in public view, one bench memo at a time.

With the first cohort’s placements now complete, Campbell University has indicated plans to expand the program to additional African apex courts in coming cycles. Whether other US law schools attempt to replicate the model, and whether Namibia’s Supreme Court continues its documented pattern of favoring Namibian authority over South African precedent in the cases now moving through its docket, are both worth watching in the months ahead.