From the Sun-Times:

International law now vital: Fitzgerald
Prosecutor talks to U.S. lawyers visiting Dublin

March 17, 2007
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH Legal Affairs Reporter
DUBLIN, Ireland -- American prosecutors increasingly have to be aware of other countries' laws, Patrick Fitzgerald, Chicago's U.S. attorney, told a gathering of lawyers here Friday.
One example would be a prosecutor trying to go after a child molester who puts footage of his actions on the Internet. A prosecutor would need to be familiar with the laws of the country in which the transmission originates, Fitzgerald said.

"We used to think of prosecutions of conduct happening outside the United States as coming once in a blue moon, but I think we're going to start seeing this a lot more frequently," Fitzgerald said.

Taking the tougher route
When Fitzgerald went to Kenya in 1998 to investigate the bombing of the U.S. Embassy there, he and his team decided to follow both American and Kenyan law until they decided which country they would file charges in.
"If there were two ways of doing it, we would do it the harder way so it would stand up in court in either place," he said.

That meant that instead of letting a witness sit behind a one-way mirror and point out a suspect from a lineup of six people, as U.S. law requires, witnesses had to come face-to-face with a lineup of nine people, then walk up and place their hand on the shoulder of the suspect they identified, as required under Kenyan law.

Kenya does not guarantee suspects the right to an attorney, and the New York judge who tried the case was not satisfied Fitzgerald's team had satisfied their obligation under American law to educate the suspect of his right to an attorney and so dismissed some parts of the man's confession.

But both suspects were convicted anyway.

Took no class
Fitzgerald was one of the 63 percent of American lawyers who took no international law class in law school.
"I thought that was for students who studied Spanish or French. When you're from Brooklyn, you're working on English as your first language," he quipped.

The audience of mostly American lawyers at the Chicago Bar Association-sponsored seminar included Mike Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, and eight current and former state and federal judges.