Oleg Riabokon: You can take some responsibility

19/11/2010 News and Publications

Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine considers Oleg Riabokon one of the most successful graduates

The LL.M.s

By Ann W. Parks

In the fall of 2009, a ukrainian international lawyer named Oleg Riabokon (LL.M. ’96) made a surprising career move. He left his job as managing partner of Magisters, a firm he co-founded more than a decade earlier, to fix what he saw as a serious problem with that country’s civil rights. Since the Orange Revolution of 2004 (a successful democratic protest of an allegedly corrupt presidential election), the political situation in Ukraine has remained shaky, with billionaires taking the top government positions. Riabokon wanted to do something about it, so he ran for president of his country. “You can stand aside and say it’s not your fault, or you can take some responsibility,” he told a group of students gathered at the Law Center in March. Riabokon chose the latter.

Every year, hundreds of Georgetown Law LL.M. students graduate and join the ranks of alumni like Riabokon, who are taking on the world in astonishingly diverse ways. And every day, more than 10,000 LL.M. graduates worldwide — a staggering number for any law school — are applying what they’ve learned at Georgetown through tax or securities work in Washington, D.C., by teaching at law schools from Utah to Estonia or by pursuing impact litigation in women’s rights in Cape Town, South Africa, just to name a few of their many occupations. The school’s international focus is unquestionably diverse: Students from 136 of the 192 countries in the United Nations have studied here in the last 25 years. In addition to being lawyers, LL.M. graduates have served as diplomats, politicians, government officials and judges everywhere from Brazil to Uganda.

“So many of them say they can never think about the law the same and they never think about the world the same, so it opens up a lot of different surprising avenues for them,” Dory Mayer, director of International Student Services at Georgetown Law, says of the foreign LL.M.s — who comprise more than half the full-time students earning an LL.M. from Georgetown Law each year. “Many of them are totally amazed at what they are doing in five years [after graduation] because they could not have predicted it.”

Like Riabokon. Though reluctant to leave the law firm he founded and helped grow into one of the top 100 firms in Europe, he dove into Ukrainian politics, learning the system even as he was running for president. Faced with a media that was still under government control and a populace that was just beginning to think in terms of a civil society, he did not emerge the winner. But he has since launched a political party called Nash Chas (“Our Time”), which will enable him to participate in future elections, and he also founded the Civil Rights Movement of Oleg Riabokon, which will work with the general public in Ukraine to promote civil society. (And yes, he does credit Georgetown Law with being the “tool and inspiration” for his achievements.)

“I don’t want to live in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where oligarchs rule,” Riabokon says. “I ran for president and now stay in politics with one hope, that one day we are able to change Ukraine to a place where people can live happily.”

Georgetown University is the oldest Catholic university in the United States, founded in 1789.

In different years, graduates were: 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton, President of

the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite and

other prominent figures in politics, law, business, medicine and arts