PENN LAW — Hermes Hein Aedo LLM’22 and María Alejandra Maldonado Ibaceta LLM’22 came to the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School together from their home country of Chile, where they both worked in different sectors of criminal law. As students in the LLM program, they have delved deeply into both U.S. criminal law and international human rights law and have set ambitious goals for how to apply what they have learned as they move forward in their careers. Though the pandemic ultimately deferred their start dates until 2021, Hermes and Alejandra first applied to the LLM program in 2019 – a pivotal year in recent Chilean history, marked by social uprisings of historic scale. Alejandra felt the impact of the uprising acutely at her job as the chief of staff of the Council’s President in the Chilean State Defense Council. “This public agency has the mission, on the one hand, to protect and monitor public resources because, in short, we are the lawyers of the State. But, on the other hand, it also has the mission to aid in the prosecution of crimes committed by public employees, and that involves the police,” Alejandra said. “As you can imagine, in the context of massive protests all over the country, the potential of police abuse and misconduct increased significantly.”