By Jamie Webb The Livingston Parish News

‘I think this conti-nent could use a little Livingston Parish,” pro-

claims the tagline of the blog Jeffrey Wale kept during his first trip to Europe.

Wale, a 2007 Denham Springs High School graduate, is a law stu-dent at the LSU Law Center, and he and fel-low DSHS grads Olivia Keen and Carlo Gulina took part in a six-week study abroad program in Lyon, France, which the university has of-fered for more than 25 years.

Hosted by the law school of Université Jean Moulin - Lyon III, the program offers stu-dents the opportunity to broaden their learning experiences by earn-ing up to seven credits in comparative and international law topics taught by internation-ally-distinguished pro-fessors and lecturers.

The program is open to all U.S. students that have completed one year of law school, as well as students from foreign law schools with compa-rable credentials.

Wale and his class-mates studied the dif-ferences between law in the United States and law in France. “The rea-son we go to France is because Louisiana has the Civil Code, which it adopted from France’s Civil Code, so we have that connection. It’s a little bit easier for us to study French law and international law over there,” he said.

Though the classes are in France, Wale said

they are all taught in English, and all of the professors are Ameri-can, including one from LSU, one from Duke, a federal judge and a media lawyer.

“We took a few differ-ent classes,” Wale said. “The first was Interna-tional Technology and Warfare and how tech-nology influences war, which is a very neat class. You learn about how technology has ad-vanced and how law has to keep up with it, es-pecially cyber warfare. Cyber warfare is a very new thing in the world, so it was very exciting to study how that impacts life and how countries can literally start war with each other online.”Another of his classes

was Access to Justice, which focuses on provid-ing legal help to those who are financially un-able to obtain it. “This is something I’m working on this semester in law school,” Wale said. “I’ll be working in an LSU clinic which gives legal aid to those who are un-able to afford it.”

Another class he took was a comparative media class, which com-pared libel and defama-tion cases in Britain, France and the United States. His fourth class was taught by a federal judge. “We studied the differences between how the French system operates and how the American system oper-ates and the role of the judge in a courtroom in each of those,” Wale said.

They also took a class field trip to Geneva, Switzerland, to tour the International Labor Of-

fice. “Our class divided into teams and did a mock debate similar to how the ILO operates,” Wale blogged. “The ILO looks out for interna-tional labor standards around the world.”

The classes were supplemented with a media law roundtable. “We had the top media lawyers from America and one of the top media lawyers in Britain and a couple of French experts come and describe the comparative media law between America and Europe,” Wale said.

His Denham class-mates listed other class-es as their favorites. Keen said, “My favorite

class in Europe was Sto-len Art and Protection of Cultural Property. It was interesting to see how different countries treated returning stolen artwork after World War II.”

Gulina said his favor-ite class was Law of Wine. “The class dealt with trademark issues and other constitutional law issues. The course was mostly concerning U.S. law, but it also gave

a great comparative insight into our French counterpart’s intricate laws for producing wine.”

During their time in Lyon, Wale, Keen and Gulina shared an apartment with another student. Wale was happy to report that he and his fellow Livingston Parish friends still got along after the trip. “We stuck together and got along well. We just had

that bond from going to school together for so long,” he said.

They have attended school together since 6th grade at Denham Springs Junior High. After graduating from DSHS, all three enrolled at LSU, but with differ-ent majors.

“I graduated in po-litical science, Carlo

Live Oak Highcheerleaders. B3.Living

Learning Law in Lyon

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The Eiffel Tower forms part of the scenery as Carlo Gulina pauses on top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

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Jeffrey Wale (left), Olivia Keen and Carlo

Gulina pause on the Sound of Music Tour

in Salzburg for a photo against the

Austrian Alps.

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Olivia Keen sports her Mickey Mouse shirt at Disneyland Paris.At left, while in London, Jeffrey Wale pauses for a photo in an iconic red phone booth.

Three DShS GrADS TOUr Europe while on an LSU Law Center study abroad program in Lyon, France.

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graduated in mass com-munications, and Olivia graduated in business,” Wale said. “We were ‘the Denham students.’ A lot of people like to give us a hard time about that.”

Though they are all in law school together, they are interested in differ-ent careers. “I want to go into sports, like an agent of some sort, but I am realistic about how hard that field is to get into,” Keen said. Gulina said his mother

is a paralegal, and her field inadvertently rubbed off on him. “I plan on hopefully finding work after law school doing prosecut-ing with a District At-torney’s office or maybe an Attorney General’s office,” he said.

“I’m looking into ei-ther government or fam-ily law,” Wale said. “I’ve always had a fascination with the law. I also had a big fascination with politics. I’ve always been obsessed with the political process.” One of his influences is his mother, Cindy Wale, who is a member of the Parish Council.

“I’ve been watching the political conven-tions since I was a kid. My parents laugh at me because I watch the Democratic and Repub-lican conventions like they were the Oscars or something. Through my study of political science, I just realized the law was something I was more interested in, and it was something I could see myself doing in the future,” he said.

Though the Lyon trip is a study abroad pro-gram, Wale admitted, “it’s kind of hard to study when Europe is at your back door.” It was his and Gulina’s first visit to Europe, and they made sure to make the most of their time there.

It was Keen’s second visit, and she had been to Paris before. She stayed for three of the six weeks of the pro-gram. The students financed the trip them-selves, and she was able to pay for three weeks without taking out loans.

Classes only took place Monday through Thurs-day, and the students traveled during their free time. Wale and Keen traveled together while she was there, and they visited Paris and London as well as Munich, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria.

Wale also visited Flor-ence and Venice in Italy and returned to Paris for his last weekend.

He kept a detailed day-to-day blog, eurowale.wordpress.com, of his many adventures in Europe. Some of the highlights included the Sound of Music Tour in Salzburg; visiting Disneyland, seeing the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and eating crepes behind Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris; seeing Bucking-ham Palace, Parliament and Big Ben and doing the Harry Potter War-ner Bros. studio tour and the walking tour of Harry Potter sites in London; taking a water taxi and watching the gondolas in Venice; and seeing the statue of David and visiting the Galileo Museum in Florence.

Wale’s favorite experi-ences included taking river cruises and sailing past many famous land-marks. They cruised the Thames in London and saw Big Ben, London Bridge and the Tower of London. In Paris, they cruised the Seine, where they got to watch the sun set on the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

They also did a river cruise in Lyon to see the

highlights of their host city, which is the coun-try’s second largest city after Paris. “It was kind of like a bigger New Orleans there,” Wale said. “It was neat to see how much a lot of the European cities were like New Orleans.”

Two experiences he made special mention of were in Munich and Paris. “We went to Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany. It was a memorial site for the Holocaust from World War II. It was a really emotional experi-ence,” Wale said. “I just think it was something we needed to do as Americans to see what we were fighting for over there.”

His experience in Par-is was another emotion-al one. “The best thing I did in Paris was attend Mass at Notre Dame,” he said. “I went in the morning, and the choir started, and it was just awesome. I think every Catholic needs to put it on their bucket list. The funny thing was I had a friend who went who wasn’t Catholic, and she had gone into the gift shop while Mass was going on, and she said she started crying when the choir started because everything was

so beautiful.”Keen said her favorite

aspect of the trip was the shopping, and she was in France during their “soldes,” or sales on leftover items.

“During the month of July, the entire country is on sale,” she said. “It’s a government mandated sale period and literally every store has a huge sale. French women take off of work to shop on the first day of these sales.”

She said she also enjoyed Germany’s friendly atmosphere and added, “I’m also bound to like anywhere that only serves beer in liters and nothing smaller.”

Though Gulina did go with Keen and Wale on a few excursions, includ-ing the Sound of Music Tour, he had travel plans of his own.

“I’m Italian, so natu-rally my favorite week-end trip was to Cinque Terra, Italy,” he said. “Cinque Terra is a small coastal city not far from Florence. The food there was absolutely incred-ible, and the people were some of the nicest we ever encountered in Europe.”

His other trips includ-ed a visit to Interlaken, Switzerland, and a

reunion in Munich.“While in Munich, I

was fortunate enough to get a chance to be reunited with my aunt. She moved back home to Germany when I was only 2 years old, and she hadn’t seen anyone from my family since then (1991). She and my mother, Barbara Cook, stay in touch on Face-book, and we were able to organize a meeting. My aunt drove over two hours to meet me in Munich. We had lunch together at a café near our hotel and talked for almost three hours. It was a very special time to finally get to really meet each other,” he said.

For the three Denham students, this was the trip of a lifetime. Howev-er, there were a few les-sons that they learned very quickly.

There was no air conditioning or clothes dryer in their apart-ment, and Wale bought a rotating fan. “The air conditioning was how much you opened your window at night,” he said. “When you wanted to dry your clothes, you put them on a rack by the window and pointed the fan at them, so you could have dry clothes in 24 hours if you want-

ed.” He also said the food

hours were unexpected. They could only buy food from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. None of the restaurants there sold fountain drinks, and the only place they could find them were McDon-ald’s and Subway.

The students also be-came very familiar with the train and metro sys-tems, and Wale stressed that the departure times are strictly enforced.

“The biggest thing there was people don’t do lines very well,” Wale said as he was describ-ing his first Paris trip. “We got literally pushed off the bus because it was so crowded one day. People use their baby strollers as weapons.”

Other than a few minor hiccups, the students loved the trip. “This was one of the best experiences of my life,” Guilina said. “I learned a great deal about many different cultures and lifestyles that I know will help give me a greater per-spective on different is-sues in the future. Also, after successfully learn-ing how to navigate Europe, I feel like I can get around just about anywhere now!”

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Jumping off from Lyon

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Jeffrey Wale’s position on a bridge over the Grand Canal provides a panoramic view of Venice.