It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Felice Batlan (left) as today's guest blogger.Felice is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent College of Law. She joined that faculty in 2006; before that, she taught at Tulane Law School. At Chicago-Kent, Felice teaches corporate law, securities regulation, legal history, and feminist legal theory. We've posted on her feminist legal history scholarship here and here. In her guest post below, she situates Florence Kelley (1859-1932) -- a lawyer and social-political reformer active on issues including women's suffrage, the labor movement, and children's rights -- in the struggle against laissez-faire industrialism that had been sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in cases like Lochner v. New York (1905).
Before entering academia, Felice spent 9 years in legal practice, as a corporate and litigation associate in New York and as head of global compliance and associate general counsel at Greenwich Capital Markets. After that, she earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from New York University. Felice also holds a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, and a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Smith College. After law school, she served as a law clerk for Judge Constance Baker Motley, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York -- an IntLawGrrls foremother!
Honors that Felice has received include: the IIT Julia Beveridge Award for service to students; a 2003 fellowship at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and the 2003 Dissertation Writing Award of the Coordinating Council For Women in History / Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians.
Felice has served as: an associate editor and book review editor of Continuity and Change, an academic journal dedicated to exploring the legal and social structures of past societies; an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (David Tanenhaus ed., 2008), with responsibility for sections on corporations, women, gender, and sexuality; and as a member of the board of the H-Net website for humanities and social sciences. She's also been an adviser to the historical society of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Dedicating her post to Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871-1945), Felice writes:
Boyd Hawes (above right; photo credit) joins Judge Baker Motley and other foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.
Harriet Boyd Hawes was on of the first professional women archeologists. In the late 19th century, she studied at the American School in Athens and spent the next years on Crete excavating a number of important sites. Eventually Hawes taught at both Smith and Wellesley. Like so many women “firsts” she would not accept no as an answer and lived her life adventurously and often defiantly.
Heartfelt welcome!
