By Andrew Cohen
People have varying motivations for choosing where they apply to law school, from reputation and job placement data to course offerings and pro bono opportunities. Even so, 3L Simone Browne was surely unique among her classmates in one driving factor.
“I only applied to law schools that either have a carillon or are close enough to a carillon that I could keep playing while studying,” she says.
The carillon is an instrument of at least 23 chromatically tuned bells — played from a keyboard with hand and foot pedals, usually in a tower — that generate harmonious chords. At UC Berkeley they’re housed in the iconic Campanile, the world’s second-tallest freestanding clock and bell tower, which offers sweeping Bay Area views and free daily recitals.
“There’s a very short list of law schools that have strong international law programming, support for public interest law, and a world-class carillon, so it wasn’t a difficult choice to come to Berkeley,” she says.
Browne fell in love with the carillon as a University of Chicago undergrad. A musician for most of her life, mainly on the cello, she auditioned into the school’s competitive carillon studio and began diving in.
“From the first time I touched the keyboard, I loved how carillon music allows the performer to connect with audiences listening from the ground,” says Browne, who got to premiere a piece composed by another student and perform on campus at special events. “I also gave a lot of public tower tours, which were a ton of fun because they let me share this cool instrument that I loved with people who had never seen it before.”
Music to her ears
Browne’s interest intensified when she first went to the Netherlands — a stopover en route to an academic human rights study abroad program in Vienna — and connected with virtuosic Dutch carillonist Boudewijn Zwart, who let her play several of Amsterdam’s oldest carillons.
Moved by how carillon music had become part of the city’s spirit and history, Browne did a carillon internship-in-residence in Luray, Virginia, worked as a summer carillonneur back on campus in Chicago, and spent her senior year prepping for her North American professional carillon certification. By the time Browne passed in 2019 — the same week as her college graduation — she was “completely hooked.”
Over the next few years, Browne received a Belgian-American Educational Foundation fellowship to study at the Royal Carillon School in Belgium, where she also authored an original thesis on global and local carillon cultures.
After graduating, Browne stayed another year to diversify her repertoire, pursuing a specialization in arranging and performing music composed by women. She also played three major concert tours around Europe and the U.S., enhanced her technique studying under esteemed carillonist Geert D’hollander as a Blanchard Carillon Fellow, and engaged in research projects about Ukrainian carillons, women’s roles in carillon history, and oral history within the North American carillon community.
Now, Browne serves as Berkeley’s interim university carillonist.
“I play regular recitals while also managing and teaching the carillon studio,” she says. “It’s demanding to juggle dual roles as a grad student and an instructor, in different fields with different schedules and expectations. The logistics are challenging, especially because the law school operates on a different academic calendar than the rest of the campus and because my carillon role also involves a good deal of administration on top of teaching and playing.”
The right duet
Yet amid prioritizing time management and sleep, Browne finds that law and music provide a welcome balance.
“I think of it as ‘law brain’ and ‘music brain,’” she says. “After using my law brain to puzzle through legal issues, I can switch to music brain and spend a few hours in the carillon tower studying a new piece. And making space for my love of music is something I’ve been doing for a long time.”
In college, writing her senior Public Policy thesis while simultaneously preparing for her first carillon professional examination required blocking out a lot of extra practice time: “When I got frustrated or tired of my thesis, I walked to the tower and let myself recover by playing carillon; when I got tired of practicing, I turned back to my thesis.”
In law school, student organizations like the Berkeley Journal of International Law and the International Human Rights Workshop provided community and a deeper understanding of international law. Browne held leadership positions with both organizations and remains involved in the Name and Gender Change Workshop, one of the school’s 40-plus Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects.
As a Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law student fellow, she also helped Professor Katerina Linos and former International Court of Justice President Judge Joan Donoghue ’81, a visiting professor last year, in myriad ways: reviewing and editing articles for a symposium on European Union law, researching international judges to support interviews for Linos’s “Borderlines” podcast, and developing Donoghue’s course on Global Dispute Resolution.
“Berkeley Law offers great international law programming, particularly for those interested in human rights,” Browne says. “We have not only the Miller Institute, but also the Human Rights Center and a thriving group of international law-focused student organizations.”
International inspiration
Browne was also chosen last year for the prestigious Salzburg Lloyd N. Cutler Fellows Program in International Law, which annually brings together about 55 of the nation’s top law students with leading academics, judges, and practitioners in private and public international law.
With Miller Institute support, she and three other Berkeley Law student fellows traveled to Washington, D.C., presented international law papers-in-progress, and networked. Browne’s paper, “Beyond Firewalls: Realizing an international human right to the internet through net neutrality and anonymizer access,” was inspired by her academic experiences abroad, and stresses the necessity of evolving human rights protections within an ever-digitizing world.
Before law school, she taught English in Ukraine as a Fulbright Scholar and learned to speak Ukrainian mainly through immersion, which she describes as both challenging and rewarding.
“As an American with Ukrainian heritage, I found very personal meaning in finally being able to speak Ukrainian, a language that’s hard to study largely because it has long been repressed by legal and cultural structures of domination,” Browne says. “As my language skills grew stronger, my ability to connect with the people around me did as well.”
She also took music lessons on the bandura, Ukraine’s national instrument, and taught — of course — a carillon master class.
“Living and studying in Ukraine, China, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland, all of these language learning experiences have taught me how to listen,” Browne says. “The kinds of connections that open up through immersion, through listening, is something I value very highly — and something I often miss in legal spaces.”