CWL --- African-Virginians, African-Confederates and African American Attitudes in 1861

Afro-Virginians Attitudes on Secession and Civil War, 1861, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., in Virginia At War, 1861William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, Jr., University of Kentucky, 2005, pp. 89-112.

Virginia, a bi-racial commonwealth of 500,000 blacks and 1,000,000 whites in 1861 "had more black inhabitants than anywhere else in North America and the most enslaved blacks in the Western Hemisphere except Brazil." Of the Confederacy's 3,700,000 African Americans, Virginia was home to one-sixth of them. The explore their feelings, attitudes and commitments is a difficult thing to do. Very little first-hand documentation of the blacks' voices exists. The record of black voices is mediated by the whites recording of the words and behaviors. In the Southland, the nearly complete lack of African American editorial voices, diaries, letters, makes discovery of African Americans hearts and minds inherently hard work for the researcher. (pp. 89-90)

"Possibly the best means of ascertaining black Virginians' collective and individual perspectives about the times is to examine their works and deeds concerning slavery, free blacks, and Afro-Confederates; there surreptitious longings for freedom as manifested by running away; their relations with the Union army; and limited attempts to rise up against their racial suppressors." The lack of slave revolts is not a sign of lack of desire for freedom. While the Brown raid on Harper's Ferry, VA in October 1859, exposed the climate of fear among slaveholders, the raid came is signify to blacks the coming of a possible future, a meteor of war to use Herman Melville's term. (pp. 90-92)

After Virginia seceded on April 17 and the voters ratified the decision in mid-May, the black servant who daily raised the national colors over the state capitol, rescued the Stars and Stripes from the trash bin and hid it under his bed for the duration of the war. On the other hand, a slaveholder asked Jefferson Davis "Can we really expect the Negroes to stand with us?" Several slaveholders forced their slave families to emigrate to Missouri or Texas. Jordan, the essay's author, states "Confederate Virginians generally regarded slavery and white supremacy as a fundamentally natural order and divinely ordered way of life." Alexander Stephens viewed the Confederate Revolution as a keeping the world right side up and the Northern aggressor as desiring to turn the natural order of things upside down. For Stephens, slavery was the cornerstone of social, political and economic Confederate temple.(pp.93-94)

Desiring freedom, the slaves understood the constraints of the racist society in which they lived and which employed personal violence against them. Free blacks in Virginia faced a two horned dilemma: stay free and avoid the suspicion that they would become the Nat Turners of their day. The slave Nat Turner led a three day massacre in southeastern Virginia in 1831 which accomplished the deaths of over sixty whites and the swift, white response of executing well over 100 slaves.

Free blacks became Afro-Confederates as a means of preserving what freedoms they had.
They volunteered for work details building forts, served in CSA regiments as musicians and as commissary aides. "Afro-Confederates' scruples were either coerced, feigned or sincere," Jordan states. The two-horned dilemma is apparent is the instance of Mortimer Raymond, a black Richmond police informer who "reported on black offenders" but to his own astonishment was sent to the whipping post for the crime of associating "with a white woman upon terms of closer familiarity than the law permitted." His loyalty to whites did not mean that he could exercise a freedom of association with them. (95-97)

During the autumn of 1861, the enthusiasm of Afro-Confederates began to wane. Harsh camp treatment, broken promises and forced labor diminished the early 1861 desire to please and fit into the new Confederate society. Rumors of white led slave revolts were common throughout 1861; arrests and punishments with little or no evidence of revolt were just as common. Jordan states that 1861 closed Afro-Virginians, whether slaves, freemen, or serving in CSA forces, looked to the future "with pragmatic hope." (104-105)

A Hybrid Truth Commission?

In response to criticism of international ad hoc tribunals (too expensive, too distant from the societies they aim to serve) and domestic trials (too biased, insufficient infrastructure) in addressing crimes of mass violence, we've seen the rise of hybrid tribunals that combine elements of international and national structures (think the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone). Now we may be seeing a new breed of truth commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, created to examine the causes of the conflict in Liberia from 1979 to 2003, is working with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights to take statements of Liberians living here in the United States for use before the commission. Indeed, some of this statement-taking will be happening right here in Philadelphia, under the direction of Sarah Paoletti, who runs the new Transnational Clinic at Penn Law. This creative approach enables the cash-strapped Liberian TRC to marshall the resources of American NGOs and law school clinics and to reach populations that fled the country, many because they were targeted by the Doe or Taylor regimes. Liberian refugees as far away as Sweden have expressed interest in being involved in the TRC in this way, and the same organizations that take statements here in the U.S. will also travel to Ghana to assist in statement-taking there. While this approach might be culturally appropriate only for a country with such strong historical ties to the United States, it seems a promising way forward for Liberia, and the engagement of the diaspora may provide useful lessons for future truth commissions around the world. (Photo credit to Richard Franco.)

On August 31, ...

.... 1870, Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, to a civil-servant father and "a well educated, wealthy" mother "devoted to liberation and unity of Italy." An avid student, Maria found her desire to study medicine opposed by her father and impaired by Rome's educational establishment. Her persistence won out, however, and in 1896 she became the 1st woman to graduate from medical school in Italy. Her work with children in asylums for the mentally ill sowed the seeds of a career in early childhood education, and development of what is now known worldwide as "the Montessori Method." (Montessori's above at left, with an unnamed child.) Exiled from Italy during World War II because of her opposition to fascism, Montessori established an Education for Peace program in India, for which she twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in 1952 in the Netherlands.
... 1957 (50 years ago today), at midnight, the Federation of Malay became independent of British rule. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious country known today as Malaysia (flag at right) "boasts one of south-east Asia's most vibrant economies, the fruit of decades of industrial growth and political stability."

Women at Nuremberg: Press

(Part 3 of IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series)

"Approximately 250 journalists crowded the press section of Courtroom 600 -- on some days such as on opening day, November 20, 1945, or the verdict announcement on August 31, 1946, every last seat was occupied," Peter Heigl writes, in his book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials, of media coverage of the 1st proceeding, known as the Trial of the Major War Criminals. Reporters hailed from a score of countries, including 80 Americans, 40 Français, 35 Soviets, 20 Poles, 12 Czechs, and 5 Germans. They were joined by broadcasters, photojournalists, and authors, all of whom came to see what was happening at Nuremberg.
This media throng included a number of women, some of whom are profiled in Nancy Caldwell Sorel's The Women Who Wrote the War. Women journalists at Nuremberg included:

Tania Long
During World War II the New York Herald Tribune's assignment of Long to its London office drew this objection from New York Times reporter F. Raymond Daniell, who'd cover the Scottsboro case, among others, before the war: "You don't want a girl. This is a man's job." Long, who'd been born in Berlin and educated in London and Paris, no doubt proved her mettle: within years the couple were married. For decades thereafter they were a dynamic journalistic duo; they're pictured above covering a press conference at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. While posted in Ottawa in 1954, the couple delivered remarks to the Empire Club of Canada. Long's account of her own experiences and observations on the world's growing interdependence began with this subtle prod to her hosts:

I am greatly honoured to be here today. Indeed I am very flattered to be here, since I understand that it is rare that meetings of this group are open to the ladies.

Daniel seconded the sentiment in his own remarks.

Martha Gellhorn

The journalism career of Martha Gellhorn (right) began with a gig covering haute couture in Paris in the Thirties, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the middle of that decade, and, it is said, the urging of her then-husband, Ernest Hemingway, turned her into a war correspondent. Gellhorn reported on the beach at D-Day, at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, and at the Nuremberg trials. She covered the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama at age 81. When she died 8 years later, an admirer recalled Gellhorn's comment on her own work:

'I wrote fiction because I love to, and journalism from curiosity which has, I think, no limits and ends only with death.'

Rebecca West

Englishwoman Cicily Isabel Fairfield (left) took "Rebecca West," the name of an Ibsen character whom she once played, to write novels and nonfiction, including 2 books inspired by the post-World War II trials, The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955).

Victoria Ocampo

Victoria Ocampo (right) was an Argentine intellectual and ally of Gabriela Mistral, namesake of an IntLawGrrl. Ocampo's "admirable" dispatches, spiced with accounts of participants' "'tics,'" are part of Testimonios. Series primera y quinta, published in Buenos Aires in 2000.

Erika Mann

The oldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia Mann, Erika Mann (right) is described as a "[w]riter, actress, and intellectual refugee from the Third Reich," and "one of the twentieth century's most intriguing nonconformists." This outspoken critic of Nazism

was one of the few women journalists covering the Nuremberg trials who attained access to the defendants. Mann's experience with cabaret irony attuned her senses to the macabre spectacle of unrepentant Nazis treating their trials as a performance. She later commented, 'no spookier adventure could be imagined.'

Janet Flanner

Paris-based Janet Flanner -- she is pictured at left with Hemingway -- wrote about World War II and its aftermath for the New Yorker. The Indiana-born expat had been a feminist activist and part of the Algonquin Round Table before the war. Her coverage of the postwar trial included this food for thought:

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

Still to come in this Women at Nuremberg series: Witnesses, Defendants. Already posted: Prosecutors, Staffers.

On August 30, ...

.... 2003, after "'nonstop'" negotiations, the General Council of the World Trade Organization agreed to let developing countries to import generic drugs without violating patent rights with regard to those drugs. Many lauded the accord, given the mouthful-of-a-title "Implementation of paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and public health." But others, among them Ellen 't Hoen, coordinator of a medicine-access campaign for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, said that the agreement "offers little comfort for poor patients," for the reason that "[g]lobal patent rules will continue to drive up the price of medicines."
... 1967 (40 years ago today), "[a]fter lengthy and often very heated debate the Senate confirmed the appointment" of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. He became the 1st African-American person to serve on the country's highest court. (Mightn't he have been the 1st person of African ancestry to serve on any supreme court outside of Africa?) Marshall (left), who'd appeared frequently before the Court to argue landmark civil rights cases and then as Solicitor General, served as an Associate Justice for 23 years. He died at age 86 in 1993. (portrait by Simmie L. Knox from the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)

Off Topic and CWL: French and Indian War

Blooding at Great Meadows: Young George Washington and the Battle that Shaped the Man, Alan Axelrod, 272 pages, endnotes, index, Running Press Book Publishers. 2007.


The French and Indian War is local history for me.

As a child, a summer vacation from the southwestern Pennsylvania dairy farm, was an six hour event: a one hour drive to Fort Necessity to spend a Sunday afternoon, and then drive back in time to milk the cows around 6:00pm. On a high school field trip for a Latin (language) festival, I walked across the Fort Pitt bridge to 'The Point' and visited the Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt Museum. Wjhile attending the local college and during an autumn Saturday, I travelled 90 minutes and hiked the Jumonville Glen at which Washington 'assasinated' the French embassador. After all, I was bred, born and raised in Washington County, Pennsylvania and it had once been named Augusta County and claimed by Virginia. 2004 was the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the very first world war and it anniversary commoration was a local event.
More text to come.

Alan Axelrod, the author, sticks close to the primary sources of the period. Unfortunately there is no bibliography and the narrative text is not exhaustively footnoted. Washington's Writings and Washington's Papers are heavily relied upon, so much so, that the clarity of Washington's voice comes through to the reader. Those biographies that are considered as academically solid and not hagiography are relied upon by Axelrod. Those biographies which are not well founded upon primary sources are used to contrast the stereotypical Washington with the actual Washington.

Axelrod looks for the flesh of the young Washington beneath the marble of the post-Revolutionary War patriot. The author's presentation of Washington's life before the Revolution is clear and concise. The reader understands the growth and development of the young Virginian on-the-make. The tide of colonial events and the current of Washington's own motivation carry him into the Appalachian wilderness several times. Two of the three excursions into the region of the Forks of the Ohio nearly ends the young man's life. The 1753 trek to and from Fort LaBeuf near Lake Erie during December is full of treacherous Indian guides, rafts on icy rivers, deep snow falls and near starvation. The 1754 campaign against Fort Duquesne ended in Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity and his inadvertent admission of guilt for the assassination of a French diplomat. The 1755 campaign with the British army, again towards Fort Duquesne, ended in the near massacre of the force, the death of British General Braddock, and Washington wearing a coat with six bullet holes in it.

The compressed and forceful narrative works well for the story, yet this reader wished for more coverage of the defeat at Turtle Creek. The title states the book ends at Great Meadows, at which Fort Necessity existed in 1754. Axelrod continues the story through the next year, 1755 and the Battle of Turtle Creek but the discussion of this event is slim, though well done. There are no maps or illustrations in the book; this is unfortunate. Overall though, Axelrod succeeds in providing a vivid, primary source driven story with due consideration of the myths that have evolved over the generations.

Other Voices: The Real War Is Getting Into The Books

People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854-1877, Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sherriff Oxford University Press, 345 pages, black and white photographs, maps, index, notes, bibliography. 2007, $28.00.

While reading People At War, a review of it by Randall M. Miller, of Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, came across my desk. Here it is.

"In a crowded field of books on the Civil War era. Nelson (Steel Drivin' Man) and Sheriff ( Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862), historians at the College of William and Mary, give us something new—an engaging, informed portrait of two peoples at war, with an emphasis
on how common soldiers and noncombatants adjusted to and were changed by the war.

The authors spend more time in recruiting halls, military camps, hospitals,and prisons than in battle to observe what moved men to war and some to flee it, as
well as how the physical and emotional demands of living away from home affected their sense of self and their national identity. At the same time, they discuss how the war came home to civilians, with the raids of armies and partisans, the demands of mobilization, the death and dismemberment of soldiers, the erosion of slavery, and the promise of freedom.

They are especially good at linking the experience of, and expectations about, the war with Americans' ambitions and interests in the West. Their vivid descriptions of disease and destruction will remind readers that war was hell even as it was also an instrument of social change. The new social historians' interest in "the people" gets its full due in this readable, reliable, and remarkably relevant book."

Hot Off the Presses

Kudos to Elizabeth L. Hillman -- IntLawGrrls' own Vera Brittain -- who's just published Military Justice: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis 2007). Beth, who's a visiting professor this year at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, wrote the text along with our colleagues Eugene R. Fidell, President of the National Institute of Military Justice, and Dwight H. Sullivan, Colonel, Marine Corps Reserve, who headed defense of detainees haled before the military commissions at Guantánamo.
The publishers' description underscores the place of military justice within the larger study of systems of justice:

With prosecutions arising from the abuse at Abu Ghraib to ongoing cases alleging atrocities against civilians in Iraq, as well as courts-martial of uniformed war resisters at home, the military justice system now has a prominence unmatched since the Vietnam era. This higher profile for court-smartial, combined with the difficult and fundamental legal issues raised by the military commissions, suggests that military courses will now be in great demand. This casebook['s] coverage of the U.S. court-martial and other national and international systems of military criminal law provides a framework through which students can explore the role and operation of military justice within a democratic society.

Heartfelt congratulations!

A new Observer on the international block

Welcome to the latest addition to the international law blogroll. The newcomer is International Law Observer, a Europe-based site which describes itself as "a Blog dedicated to reports, commentary and the discussion of topical issues of Public International Law as well as EC/EU-Law." Recent items -- like this post on a Japan-Russia fishing dispute -- indicate that this's a particularly good site to keep track of international organization news.
Heartfelt thanks to blogger Dominik Zimmerman, Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, for alerting us. Happy too to see a number of women among the contributors. All 3 are based in Sweden: Matilda Arvidsson, University of Lund; Patricia Rinwigati, Uppsala University; and Katinka Svanberg, Stockholm University.

On August 29, ...

... 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, causing extensive damage, much of which has yet to be repaired 2 years later. An excellent study of the aftermath is Rebuilding After Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights in New Orleans (2006), a joint project of the University of California, Berkeley, and Tulane University.
... 1842 (165 years ago today), Queen Victoria of Britain and China's Qing Emperor concluded the Treaty of Nanking, which ended an armed conflict between the 2 countries, one that would come to be known as the First Opium War. The war had begun in 1839, after China destroyed thousands of casks of Indian opium intended for sale by the British in China, contrary to a ban that China had imposed.

Al-Odah & Boumediene Petitioners

After a flurry of filing on Friday, briefing by Petitioners in the Al-Odah and Boumediene cases (consolidated on certiorari) closed. The merits briefs and a sizable number of amicus curiae briefs are available on the Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw website. An impressive array of amici filed briefs in support of Petitioners, including the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights; European and Canadian parliamentarians; constitutional, federal jurisdiction, human rights, and humanitarian law experts and scholars, including former ICRC principals; Amnesty International; retired and former federal judges, diplomats, and military officers; the ABA; and the National Institute of Military Justice.
As discussed in prior posts (here, here, here, and here), the case presents the question, among others, of whether the Military Commission Act of 2006 (MCA) unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus in violation of the Suspension Clause, which states:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

The MCA purportedly barred the writ for pending cases wherein it states:

No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the U.S. who has been determined by the U.S. to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

In prior proceedings, the government argued that the historic writ of habeas corpus would not have extended to alien enemy combatants held extraterritorially, so the MCA works no “suspension” within the meaning of the Constitution. This is notwithstanding that the Court in Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466, 480 (2004), clearly ruled that Guantánamo was within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and that the writ did extend to Petitioners. Id. at 481-82. In the alternative, the Government has argued that Petitioners—as aliens outside sovereign U.S. territory—have no constitutional rights. Petitioners have responded that the Suspension Clause—situated in Article 1 of the Constitution—creates no individual rights, bur rather is a structural constraint on Congress providing

constitutional protection to a preexisting right founded in the common law: the right to obtain independent judicial review of a detention to ensure that no person is deprived of liberty by the Executive without a satisfactory basis in law and fact.

Al-Odah v. United States, Brief For Petitioners El-Banna et al.
Following the Supreme Court’s holding in Rasul v. Bush, the Department of Defense convened Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) to determine whether an individual could be detained as an “enemy combatant.” The Department also established Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) to meet annually to determine whether this designation still holds. The Al-Odah & Boumediene cases also present the question of whether the CSRTs and ARBs provide an adequate substitute for habeas corpus where they provide only limited rights of participation and confrontation, deny the right to counsel, admit evidence procured by torture and coercion, admit hearsay and other evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible, are apparently subject to command influence, and are not subject to plenary review on appeal. Testimony from former CSRT participants about these procedural flaws in the process, including Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham (upper left, photo by Chris Carlson/NPR), probably led to the Supreme Court reversing its original denial of certiorari in the cases.
Stay tuned for the government's briefs....

[by IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack, under her pen name Eleanor Roosevelt]

Write On! New Voices in Human Rights

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.)
The International Human Rights Section of the Association of American Law Schools invites abstract proposals from "faculty members and other scholars who have not previously had an opportunity to present a scholarly paper at an AALS annual meeting." Persons accepted will present at a morning session on Friday, January 4, 2008, during the annual meeting to be held in New York. Deadline's September 26, 2007; for details, contact rblitt@utk.edu.

On August 28, ...

... 1913, the Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina opened the Peace Palace (right) at The Hague. Administered by the Carnegie Foundation, today the building is home to a number of international institutions, including the International Court of Justice.
... 1963, in what a Washington, D.C.-based reporter called "the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen," more than 200,000 women, children, and men marched for civil rights. Leaders met at the White House with a welcoming President John F. Kennedy. Among the speakers who followed a performance by Paris-expatriate-American Josephine Baker at the Lincoln Memorial was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , who delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, a video of which is posted below.

"I Have a Dream"

CWL --- Hither To Unknown: The Soverign State of Virginia's Navy, May 1861

A Navy Department, Hitherto Unknown To Our State Organization, John Coski, in Virginia At War, 1861, William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, University of Kentucky, 2005, pp. 65-88.

Text to follow.

CWL --- Stealing the General: Not Your Disney's Train Raid

Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor, Russell S. Bonds, Westholme Press, 444 pages, maps, b/w photographs, notes, index, bibliography, $29.95, 2007.

Buster Keaton and Fess Parker. If you are over fifty, then you probably know who they are. Silent film comedian and Davy Crockett/Daniel Boone. The story of Union soldiers traveling south surreptitiously to high jack a locomotive and retreat north, all the while disabling rails and bridges was the stuff of legend before Hollywood was born. Buster Keaton's film, The General is a hallmark of silent film comedy; Fess Parker's film, The Great Locomotive Chase is the hallmark of the Cold War Disney entertainment machine.

Russell Bond's Stealing the General gives the reader the whole story: the idea, its implementation, its execution, and its failure. In April 1862, twenty Union soldiers crossed Confederate lines to steal a locomotive in an endeavor to aid in the capture of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thinking that Steven Spielberg will have Liam Neeson portray Lincoln in the film version of Team of Rivals and that Harrison Ford possibly will star in Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, then Bond's work may generate a third Civil War locomotive chase film.

Lawyer and historian, Russell Bonds offers a wonderfully gripping narrative account of the first Union invasion of Alabama, the theft and the chase, the capture of raiders, their executions and their escapes. By the end of the book, when the reader is thoroughly satisfied, the Medal of Honor is introduced and the story has a second ending, just like the movies. The author has a superlative writing style, and an authoritative control of the vast primary source material available from the participants.

Bonds also tells the stories of Confederate railroading, boom town Atlanta, and locomotive construction. In addition, not only do the personalities of the Union soldiers come to the fore but the personalities of those chasing them. To the satisfaction of this reader, Bonds provides a succinct review of the literature of the chase, both by the participants and by later writers.

Fortunately, members of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club, the Military Book Club and shoppers at Borders Books and Music and Amazon.com shoppers will have the opportunity to see the splendid cover art.

Off Topic Novel: In The Woods

In the Woods, Tana French, Viking Press, 429 pages,$24.95

Part police procedural, part psychological thriller and part fictional biography, In the Woods is a stunning demonstration of style and nuance by Tana French. Set in Dublin, Ireland the novel focuses on two crimes, nearly three decades apart. The murders occur at the same location, a wooded area that is a playground refuge and also an early Celt archaeological site.

The victims are four children one of which survives. The survivor, as an adult investigates the second, contemporary murder. Rob Ryan, the survivor, lost all memories of his childhood that occurred before the first attack. As his childhood is hidden from him, he has hidden his conflicted past from the police administrators for whom he works. An encroaching highway interchange in the semi-rural community of Knocknaree upsets the delicate balance of community and forest, ancient and contemporary pasts.

The second murder tears apart a family that well hides its dysfunctions. The death of 12 year old Katie Devlin, calls forth memories a 20 year old rape, the manipulations a psychopath and the mischief of local government corruption. Detective Ryan, the child survivor and now adult detective, and Cassie Maddox, psychology grad school drop out and undercover detective, develop both a partnership and friendship that is unique. It is the depth of these characters and those around that that is the chief strength of In The Woods. Murders and memories, psychological pressure and corrupt politics, rise above a story which could have tumbled into a tabloid-like bestseller. The real strengths of the novel is the smart craft and on-the-money metaphors Tana French uses in her memorable first novel of adults dealing with their pasts that contain violence, anger, and resolute wills to survive.

Goodbye to "Get Out of Jail Free!" cards

There's much food for thought in the news of U.S. District Judge William M. Hoeveler's ruling that Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, due for release next week from U.S. federal prison, may be extradited to France, where he's been convicted in absentia of laundering proceeds from drug trafficking through French banks and the French real estate market.

There's the decision itself, of course:

Convicted of drug trafficking by a Miami-based jury in 1992, Noriega, de facto ruler of Panama at the time of his 1989 capture there by U.S. troops, enjoys, by judicial order, the status of a prisoner of war protected by the Third Geneva Convention. Hoeveler's decision hinged, therefore, on his conclusion that the Convention does not forbid transferring a POW to a 3d state for criminal trial. Noriega's attorney's said to be mulling "whether to challenge the ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit or with the United Nations." That last reference comes as a surprise. Can't think of any U.N. body that might be able to do anything enforceable in the matter except the Security Council, where, of course, the United States and France both have power to veto any such move.

And then there's the larger picture:

As more and more states reach outside their own territory to exercise criminal jurisdiction, it seems likely that the most notorious persons who suffer conviction and less-than-a-life-sentence in 1 sovereign state will look forward not to a final release date, but rather, on release, to a move to another jail in another sovereign state. Perhaps it's the ne bis in idem (that's double jeopardy, roughly speaking) overtones in this prospect that explain France's no-comment on the still-pending U.S. case -- as Reuters' Paris bureau put it, why France has made no official statement but instead "accepted the decision with prudence and discretion."

Cambodia Tribunal Update

The Cambodian government announced Friday that You Bunleng, one of two co-investigating judges for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), will not leave his current job despite his appointment to Cambodia's Appeals Court. Apparently in response to Thursday's UN report slamming the government for transferring the judge (discussed here), this step illustrates the power of international monitoring of the Cambodian government's behavior with respect to the Khmer Rouge trials. While surely not the last of the obstacles that the government will throw in the path of the tribunal, hopefully the outrage of the international community will be as effective in dismantling future roadblocks.

On August 27, ...

... 1875, Katharine Dexter McCormick (right) was born in Dexter, Michigan. In 1904 she earned a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 1st woman ever to be graduated from that institution. After marriage to an heir of the International Harvester Co. fortune foundered when he developed schizophrenia, she devoted herself to women's issues, becoming a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the League of Women Voters. She campaigned for better and more widely available methods of contraception, and smuggled diaphragms from Britain to be used in the clinic of fellow campaigner Margaret Sanger. "[O]nce described as 'rich as Croesus,'" McCormick funded research that led to development of The Pill. Of McCormick and Sanger the Global Campaign for Microbicides writes:

No less than five men have been heralded by historians as the "father" of the modern birth control pill. In reality, it was two women who had both the foresight and the determination to transform women's sexual lives.

... 1991, the European Community recognized Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as independent nation-states.

News: A New Birth of Economic Freedom: Urban Sprawl in Adams County, Pennsylvania, Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, Elsewhere

A tour bus and a cyclist meet in front of Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa. The park has successfully fended off a plan for a nearby casino, although development is still a major threat. Photo by Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press


At Gettysburg, A New Battle: Urban Sprawl, Teresa Méndez, The Christian Science Monitor, August 24, 2007

A New List Of Endangered Battlefields Reveals Tensions Between Preservationists And Developers

Gettysburg, PA. - In 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood here and gave the speech that was to become his most famous. With brevity and eloquence he spoke of the liberty and equality upon which this country was founded. He looked forward to the Union's salvation, the end of slavery – and "a new birth of freedom."

What he couldn't have foreseen delivering the Gettysburg Address that afternoon was that a Southern colonel would one day claim this hallowed ground in the form of a KFC just beyond its gates. Or that the site of the battle's largest field hospital would be paved over. Today, a sizable chunk of Camp Letterman serves as the parking lot for Giant supermarket – a salmon slab of concrete with a few benches and two small plaques the only reminder of its historical significance.

Last year activists fought off the unthinkable: a 5,000-slot casino within a mile of the battleground. Yet Gettysburg stubbornly remains on a list of "Endangered Battlefields" compiled annually by the nonprofit Civil War Preservation Trust. It's not just Gettysburg either. The storied sites pored over in every American History class and obsessively revisited by Civil War buffs are far from uniformly protected. From suburban sprawl to mining to a lack of funds for maintenance and repair, threats to Civil War battlefields are legion. Many are scrambling to spruce up their grounds in time for the Civil War's 150th anniversary in 2011. Far from being diminished through the years, the significance of these battlegrounds, as a sort of collective time capsule, has only grown.

"The bonding between past and present is really the essence of understanding history," says James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian and Princeton professor, who has led his share of battlefield tours. "If these places didn't exist, we would never have the kind of connection between past and present that we do now." Yet as soon as one preservation crisis is managed, it seems another crops up. One National Park Service administrator likened the efforts to a game of whack-a-mole:

• Sunday marked the anniversary of the illegal excavation of Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. Antsy developers trespassed onto Park Service land to dig trenches for sewer and water piping in anticipation of a nearby development.

• In Cedar Creek, Va., a mining company is petitioning the county to have more than 600 battlefield acres rezoned so it can add five more quarries to its operations.

• And from Fort Morgan, Ala., to Fort Jackson and Fort Pike in New Orleans, funds are desperately needed to restore sites in sore disrepair.

Driving through Gettysburg, the park unfolds as a patchwork of public and private land. It's the most popular of the country's military parks, with nearly 2 million visitors each year. Yet in a head-spinning equation, only about 80 percent of its 6,000 acres are under Park Service protection. The rest is privately held, its use, in part, up to the discretion of its owners. Just as troublesome to preservationists is the property beyond the official park boundary. "We have a hard enough time trying to protect what's in the boundaries without even worrying about what's outside," says Jim Johnson, Gettysburg's acting superintendent.

Yet much of that outlying property – such as the Baltimore Pike, a strip of land southeast of Gettysburg dotted with battlegrounds and field hospitals – is of historical consequence. It's also essential to maintaining the integrity of the viewshed. Preservationists worry that instead of cotton-puff clouds, the Gettysburg vistas will be crowded with housing developments. The movement to preserve Civil War battlefields took hold in the late 1980s with the formation of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites. In 1999, it merged with another organization to form the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), which today has 70,000 members.

Not everyone is an enthusiastic conservationist, however. Once land comes under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, it's off the tax roll – which can be burdensome for cash-strapped towns. But the movement is proud of its successes. The CWPT says it has helped save more than 24,000 acres in 18 states. In fact, despite the work left to be done, Professor McPherson says American Civil War sites "may be the best preserved series of battlefields anywhere in the world."

"Europeans who come here are astonished by how much battlefield land has been preserved in the national park system," he says. For Steve Braden, a visitor from Georgia here with his family, that can only be a good thing. "To me this is as close as you get to sacred or hallowed ground in America," he says, wearing a baseball cap with the CWPT acronym. He is a member, visiting this battlefield for the first time since his college days in the 1970s.

To view "History Under Siege: A Guide to America's Most Endangered Civil War Battlefields," visit www.civilwar.org/news/topten2007/index.htm.

French diplomacy in Iraq?

"It's time to stop lecturing the Americans about their errors and start contributing to a solution," declares a LeMonde editorial in approval of the new interest in Iraq displayed by new French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
France’s intervention will definitely not be military. But playing on the 30-year relationship between Kouchner and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has close ties to Kurdish and Shiite leaders, may help speed a political solution. France’s involvement in Iraq since 2003 has been limited to writing off about $5.5 billion in debt and pushing for greater UN role. British and German leaders welcome the move as much as the United States does. But the “prevailing view” in the French diplomatic corps is that negotiating is futile; “the civil war needs to run its course”. Some also fear that getting involved will ruin France’s diplomatic standing in the rest of the Arab world and open it up to more terrorist attacks. But both conservative and left newspapers agree that it’s time to stop gloating about being right and get back to playing on the international scene. Does this mean we can get back to eating "French" fries?

Death in the heart of Texas redux

We've posted before about the fondness for the death penalty in Texas, which this week executed its 400th inmate since 1982, when it reinstated capital punishment following a brief, U.S. Supreme Court-imposed moratorium. (That's 21 so far this year, with another 3 persons set for execution this week.) Today our Opinio Juris colleague, Roger Alford, reports on a colloquy on the subject between Texas and the European Union. The EU called for a halt to executions in the state. Here's the response of Texas Gov. Rick Perry:

230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.

Roger remarks:

This is cute, but regrettable. Governor Perry doesn't seem to take the EU's statement seriously. Of course, the EU is not suggesting that it wishes to 'govern Texas.' It is simply engaging in public diplomacy about an issue of global concern. Recognizing Texas's sovereignty over this issue, it is issuing a diplomatic request for Texas to consider a moratorium.
Rather than mock the European Union's respectful diplomatic overture, I wish Governor Perry would take it seriously and address the EU's concerns on the merits.

Agree, Roger, with one caveat: Isn't it possible that Texas' response was meant neither to be cute nor mocking, but rather dead serious?

On August 26, ...

... 1996, 2 years after her appointment as a special expert by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Graça Machel (right), dubbed "children's champion" by the BBC, issued a comprehensive report on child soldiers and other impact of conflict on children throughout the world. The report issued a "call to action" for greater protection for children, in keeping with the promise of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Machel's report provided essential data for my article Calling Children to Account: The Proposal for a Juvenile Chamber in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, 29 Pepperdine Law Review 167 (2002).
... 2002 (5 years ago today), the World Summit on Sustainable Development, known colloquially as Earth Summit 2002, opened in Johannesburg, South Africa. The U.N.-sponsored meeting closed 10 days later with adoption of a Political Declaration. A Guardian (London) recap is here.
... 2007 (today), Americans celebrate Women's Equality Day on this 87th anniversary of U.S. women's suffrage. Not a Hallmark holiday yet, but 1 that politicians're eager to honor (see here and here and here).

An Agora that'd make the men of ancient Athens proud (but not in a good way)

The latest edition of the American Journal of International Law just found its way here. Among its excellent contents is part 2 of an Agora -- AJIL's term for an on-paper-only symposium about a topical topic -- on military commissions in our post-9/11 world.
"Agora," of course, is the Greek word for the marketplaces, like the one at right, where Socrates, Plato, and other men of intellect conducted public discourse. It's perhaps too apt a term here:
Couldn't help noticing that out of all the articles AJIL published -- 7 total in part 1 and part 2 -- not 1 was written by a woman.
That couldn't have been for lack of 1 able to take on the task. The notion that women do not think and work and write on issues critical to national security is, as posted before, simply wrong. At least 8 IntLawGrrls've published in the area, on military and postconflict justice, the Geneva Conventions, counterterrorism, humanitarian law: Elena Baylis (Amelia Earhart), Mary Coombs (Charming Betsy), Elizabeth Lutes Hillman (Vera Brittain), Naomi Norberg (Anna Koransky) Diane Orentlicher (Beatrice), Naomi Roht-Arriaza (Gabriela Mistral), Beth Van Schaack (Eleanor Roosevelt), and I. So too have many of our colleagues; just a few of the names that jump to mind are Rosa Brooks, Laura A. Dickinson, Jenny Martinez, Mary Ellen O'Connell, Leila Nadya Sadat, Jane Stromseth, and Ruth Wedgwood.
The absence of any such voices in this Agora makes for an unfortunate reinforcement of an outdated misapprehension about who is expert on matters of international law and national security.

A friend to women

Today's San Francisco Chronicle carries news of the passing of Leo Kanowitz (right), emeritus professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and author of "the first extensive study of women's legal status in the civil rights era," which "became a reference work for feminist scholars and activists."
Born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, Kanowitz was a feisty organizer for the feisty International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union before he began his law studies. As a postgrad in the early '60s he took part -- as the lone man -- in a women-and-the-law group put together by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a law professor at Columbia and now, of course, the lone woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ginsburg's casebook coauthor, Herma Hill Kay, law professor and former dean at the University of California, Berkeley, told Chronicle reporter Bob Egelko that through his book Women and the Law: The Unfinished Revolution (1969), Kanowitz

called people's attention to the fact that the way the law was treating women could be viewed as a civil right, a human right, and not just a woman's right.

On August 25, ...

... 1927 (80 years ago today), Althea Gibson (left) was born in Silver, South Carolina. She grew up in Harlem, where she began to play tennis, and in the early 1950s "had a scintillating amateur career in spite of segregated offerings" for African-American athletes. Later in the decade she won 11 major international titles, including the French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon. Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year in 1957, making her the 1st African-American winner. Gibson died in 2003.
... 1989, Mayumi Moriyama (right) became the 1st woman to hold the influential post of Chief Cabinet Secretary in Japan. She had been Japan's delegate to a U.N. conference on women in 1985 and served on the legislature's foreign affairs committee. Moriyama remains in government, and has served as Minister of Justice since 2001.

Executive meddling in the ECCC

Just as the Co-Investigating Judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) are getting into the meat of their work, with the prosecutors' introductory submissions filed last month, the executive has transferred Co-Investigating Judge You Bunleng to the position of President of the Cambodian Court of Appeal. Yesterday, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Human Rights in Cambodia Yash Ghai and the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers Leandro Despouy slammed the executive branch for this move, stating that "the replacement of the Appeal Court President was done at the request of the executive branch of the government in contravention of the separation of executive and judicial powers specified in the Constitution." (The Constitution empowers only the Supreme Council of Magistracy to transfer judges.) This move sends several concerning messages. First, it says to the other Cambodian judges in the ECCC that they are under the control of the executive, and can be transferred at the whim of Prime Minister Hun Sen. Second, it tells the tribunal staff, national and international, that the executive can delay the process whenever it pleases -- a real concern for the ECCC, whose three-year mandate is ticking past. Perhaps most importantly, this move signals to the rest of the Cambodian judiciary and the world that the Cambodian government is all too willing to deny the "essential protections provided to judges, including guarantees of tenure, that enable judges to administer, and be seen to administer justice efficiently, impartially and fairly, free of political interference."

Kudos to Lan Cao

A favored feature at ImmigrationProf blog, "Immigrant of the Day," provides glimpses of individuals who've come to and enriched life in the United States. A recent worthy honoree is Lan Cao (right). International law professor at Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, she came to the United States as a teenager, having grown up in wartorn Vietnam. Cao's the author of a host of law review articles in her specialization, economic globalization, ethnicity, and Asia; co-author with Himilce Novas of Everything You Need to Know About Asian American History (rev. ed. 2004); and author of a semi-autobiographical novel, Monkey Bridge (1997).

Am honored to have Professor Cao as a colleague on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

Heartfelt congratulations!

On August 24, ...

... 1950, Edith Sampson (right), 49, became the 1st African-American delegate to the United Nations to hold the position, having been appointed an alternate delegate by President Harry S. Truman. This was among many 1sts in her career: she was the 1st woman to graduate from Chicago's Loyola University School of Law; the 1st African-American woman elected a judge in the United States; and the 1st African-American to be named a member at large of NATO.
... 2006, in a move that rendered longstanding notions of the solar system obsolete, the nongovernmental organization International Astronomical Union determined that Pluto is not a planet, as schoolchildren'd been told for decades. That celestial body -- named in 1930 on a suggestion from 11-year-old English schoolgirl Venetia Burney (above) -- is now classified as a "dwarf planet," along with other bits and pieces orbiting the sun.

Women at Nuremberg: Staffers

(Part 2 of IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series)

Images of the many women who played administrative roles during the Trial of the Major War Criminals and subsequent proceedings jump out at readers of Peter Heigl's book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials (2001). Women helped direct renovation of the courtroom. They translated documents, transcribed testimony, kept papers in order, and took dictation during witness interviews. Today we'll mention just 2 of those women.

A major-domo, if you will, seems to have been Captain Virginia Gill, Administrative Officer in the Office of Chief Counsel for war crimes. (Heigl also identifies her as the Executive to the Prosecution, in a photo of her greeting 4 visiting U.S. Senators.) Gill, her hand at her cheek, is depicted above during an April 1947 courtroom session. To her left are Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, a leading prosecutor and later author of a superb memoir of the trials; Gen. Lucius D. Clay; and another prosecutor, Joseph W. Kaufman, deputy Chief of Counsel. To Gill's right, a hatted woman identified only as "Mrs. Clay" and Brig. Gen. Leroy Watson.

Another remarkable staffer at Nuremberg was Edith Simon Coliver (left, in 1940). After receiving a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, she signed on with the U.S. Office of War Information, and helped as a translator at the San Francisco Conference that concluded with adoption of the U.N. Charter. Soon after she returned to her birthplace, Germany, to work at Nuremberg. As 1 article put it:

As a 23-year-old, Coliver translated the pretrial testimony of high-ranking Nazi officer Hermann Goering for American interrogators.
'He was not particularly thrilled to see a woman, a Jewish woman, as his interpreter,' she told the Bulletin in 1995.
Coliver surprised herself by later asking Goering to sign a program. 'Then, I was ashamed of myself,' she told the Bulletin. 'Why would I be getting an autograph from Nuremberg?' So she asked her boss to sign as well. He did, next to Goering's signature, and wrote 'To Edith Simon, who helped hang the same.'

(The incident no doubt took place during the trial. Goering indeed received the death penalty, but cheated the hangman by committing suicide in his cell.)

In her later years Coliver was an executive at the Asia Foundation, serving in the Philippines and Taiwan. The Bay Area-based "'woman of the world,'" who spoke not only German and English, but also French, Spanish, Tagalog, Portuguese, and Mandarin, died in 2002 at age 79. Among her survivors is her daughter and our colleague, Sandra Coliver, Senior Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative. (photo at right courtesy of Telford Taylor Papers, Columbia University Law School; at left, Berkeley's International House).

Coming next week in this Women at Nuremberg series: Press, Witnesses, Defendants.

Micro-loan migration

Check out this article about Katrin Fakiri (right), not long ago "a single woman climbing the corporate ladder in the Silicon Valley," California's high-tech region, who returned to her birthplace, Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2002. There Fakiri directs Parwaz Microfinance Institution, which gives women micro-loans to set up small businesses. The number of beneficiaries is not small at all: Named for the Dari word meaning "to rise" or "to fly," Parwaz "offers an estimated 9,000 poor women small loans at 2 percent interest," Fariba Nawa (left), herself an Afghan-American freelance journalist, writes in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Today Fakiri's married and the mother of a young son. She's stayed on even after stepped-up violence drove other expats out of Afghanistan, and she'd rather not leave:

'In the beginning, I didn't think women would be able to open businesses and be able to pay back the loan,' Fakiri said. 'But about 98 percent are paying off their loans. If the security is good, I could stay here forever.'