Reinventing the Wheel: Creighton’s $750,000 Cuba Windfall

Creighton University School of Law has recently been awarded a $750,000 U.S. government grant to create a “a working model to establish a bilateral U.S.-Cuba property claims tribunal.” The goal is to have this model in place, along with others, for eventual use to ease Cuba’s post-Castro transition to democracy.

The grant to Creighton has already been the subject of some snarky comments in the Washington Post, pointing out that the grant to the Omaha, Nebraska school was awarded by a U.S. government official who graduated from Creighton. One wonders how the folks at the University of Miami Law School are feeling today, for instance. The grant calls for

a two-year factual/claims investigation, extensive multi-level legal analysis, significant field work in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and legitimacy modeling on sophisticated social science computer software.

I admit that I’m a bit jealous that I didn’t get such a cool grant. Still, you don’t have to be churlish to wonder how some hypothetical future Cuban government will feel when the U.S. shows up at the bargaining table with a model tribunal and, perhaps, prior legal analysis and factual investigation of disputes that the hypothetical future tribunal will settle.

One might also wonder why it is worth creating a model for a bilateral claims tribunal when this is arguably the one kind of international tribunal the U.S. over which has extensive technical expertise and historical experience. Claims from the U.S. Revolutionary War were settled by an international claims commission, as were claims from the Mexican-American War and the Iran Hostage Crisis. It is a bit surprising that there is $750,000 worth of research on this process. I suppose “legitimacy modeling” software is very expensive.