Gulardi Nurbintoro, a 2014 LL.M. graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law who is completing his S.J.D. here, will clerk at the International Court of Justice, the primary judicial branch of the United Nations, in the upcoming year.

He will take part in the International Court of Justice University Traineeship Program as the Law School's inaugural John and Dudley Macfarlane Fellow. The award comes with a $55,000 stipend to assist with travel and living expenses.

The Law School is one of a small group of leading academic institutions worldwide invited annually to submit candidates for the traineeship program.

"I would like to express my highest gratitude to the University of Virginia School of Law for the opportunity provided to me," Nurbintoro said. "It is such an extraordinary honor."

He will clerk for Judge Xue Hanquin.

Nurbintoro enters the clerkship with considerable international legal experience, having served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia prior to his studies at UVA Law. He worked most recently in the Directorate for South American and Caribbean Affairs. Prior to that, he served at the consulate general in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. 

In 2015 he participated in the Rhodes Academy in Greece, an intensive three-week course designed for practitioners of oceans law and policy, offered by UVA Law's Center for Oceans Law and Policy, one of the sponsors.

Early in his career, Nurbintoro was selected as a participant for the Junior Diplomatic Course at the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague, Netherlands — the city where the U.N. court also resides.

In addition to his UVA Law training, he holds a degree in transnational law from Universitas Indonesia.

Nurbintoro said he looks forward to learning from the judge and her colleagues on the bench, and from his fellow clerks.

He has been interested in the ICJ since he was a teenager.

"The first time I heard about the International Court of Justice was in 2002, when I learned through the news on television that the court decided a case on the sovereignty of the islands of Sipadan and Ligitan, in which Indonesia was one of the parties to the dispute," Nurbintoro said. "I was still in junior high school back then. I never imagined that around 15 years later I would actually be clerking for a judge at the ICJ."

He thanked the Indonesian government and the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for funding and supporting his education at UVA.

He said he hopes his clerkship inspires more Indonesians to apply to the program, as a way of promoting the values of the U.N. charter and the development of international law in his country.

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