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"I want to enable Canada to engage better globally. It's a way for me to pay tribute to Trudeau and his legacy." year-long clerkship with then Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Antonio Lamer, before landing at Harvard to acquire a U.S. law degree. During his time at the Cambridge, Mass., school he started to focus on comparative constitu- tional law. That shift also made sense for someone who had studied constitutional law in four countries at that point, factor- ing in a stint in South Africa between his studies at U of T and the Supreme Court clerkship. "I was really struck by how very comparative the modern practice of constitutional law had become in a lot of jurisdictions, so I was very interested in studying why that was, and how it was that countries learned from one another," he says. Choudhry has since gone on to make significant contributions both as a professor at the University of Toronto, as a writer, and in the policy arena in Canada and abroad. He was a consultant to the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, which Roy Romanow delivered in 2002, and to the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health, led by David Naylor in 2003. He was also part of a three-person panel in 2005 that recommended a major transformation of Toronto's city council. He calls that six-month stint for Toronto, "the hardest thing I've ever done," which says something about Canadian politics when you consider the nature of his work abroad. Choudhry is a key contributor to the Canadian Bar Association's international development program for Nepal. He also works with the Forum of Federations, an Ottawa-based network of organiza- tions from across the globe that promote federalism. It's high-pressure work, to be sure. Choudhry remembers landing in Sri Lanka early one morning in 2003 to give a series of workshops. He and his team had not slept. Regardless, their local partner quickly alerted them that they'd be departing in three hours for an eight- hour minivan ride to begin their work on the other side of the island. The visit took place during a ceasefire between the government and insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Yet Choudhry still compares the journey to a trip through a military camp: "The road zigzagged around guard posts, there was barbed wire everywhere. There were armed guards looking at us the entire time as we drove by burned-out villages." At the end of all that, they were met by hundreds of people who peppered them with ques- tions about federalism, language rights, policing, and other pressing topics. Choudhry is under similar pressure through his work in Nepal, which is focused on the creation of a justice-sys- tem transition plan. It involves nothing less than a wholesale retrofitting of a sys- tem that will continue to be operated by the same court staff, judges, and lawyers. "It's actually mind-bogglingly complex," he says. "These are very high-level meet- ings, and you have 10 minutes to make your point." He completely immerses himself in the issues the country faces in order to offer relevant advice that par- ties will find useful. That can be tough, however. Such facts often crystallize only after he arrives on scene. Choudhry can use the Internet for preliminary research, but "that's not ideal." Enter the $225,000 Trudeau Foundation Fellowship prize he was awarded in September. Choudhry hopes to use the endowment — perhaps the most prestigious honour in Canada for work in the humanities and social sciences — to kick-start a centre for excellence. It would serve as what he calls a "back office operation" for those working on major constitutional develop- ment projects across the globe. The centre would allow those on the ground to feed questions back to a fully equipped main office of researchers in Canada. "I think it would be extremely helpful," he says. "I interact with colleagues on the field; they're always starved for resources and support." The initiative dovetails nicely with the work of the award's namesake. Pierre Trudeau is said to have erected a sign on his door while studying political economy at Harvard, declaring himself a "citizen of the world." It's a designation Choudhry himself embraces. "I want to enable Canada to engage better globally," he says. "It's a way for me to pay tribute to Trudeau and his legacy." The Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners STEP Canada is the leading international organization for trust and estate practitioners, with 2,000 members across Canada and 14,000 worldwide holding the Trust and Estate Practitioner designation (TEP). 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