How 'bout a women's legal history trial?

A prince is about to stand trial for murder.

He's Hamlet, fatal assailant of the meddlesome man destined (if Ophelia had her way) to become his father-in-law.

At issue: given the welter of woe in which Shakespeare situated the troubled Dane, is the prince mentally competent to face judgment?

"The Trial of Hamlet" will take place January 31 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (here for tickets & image credit) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who created the play, will preside. A jury including celebs like Helen Hunt will decide.

Karen Wada of the Los Angeles Times properly places the staging in a Court tradition, writing that "[i]n 1987, for instance, three high court jurists heard arguments over who really wrote Shakespeare's plays." (On continuing high court furor over the question, see this article by Jess Bravin.)

Blog readers no doubt also are familiar with the many trials of this sort staged by the American Bar Association.

So here's a thought:

How 'bout retrying some signature event of women's legal history? (And see here and here.)

Jumping to mind are 2, both involving IntLawGrrls foremothers:

► The 1873 conviction of Susan B. Anthony (by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice) for the offense of illegal voting.

► Any number of 1917 jailings -- at times brutal -- of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns (left), and their National Woman's Party colleagues for the "direct action campaign" against U.S. entry into World War I. As IntLawGrrls alumna Catherine Lanctot has posted, they took that campaign to "the very doorstep of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson."

Additional nominations welcome.

Happy 3d birthday to us! Again.

Today we IntLawGrrls celebrate our 2d 3d birthday.
Huh?
Well, in an unintended display of math anxiety, this founder/'Grrl declared it our golden birthday on this day a year ago -- that is, said then that we'd juist turned 3 on the 3d day of the 3d month. In fact, though we were entering our 3d year, it had only been 2 years since the launch of this blog on "international law, policy, practice." But no one called us on the arithmetic error, and so today we get to celebrate gold all over again.
Since we announced our birth on what folks in Japan marked as Girls Day 2007, we've grown like Topsy.
We're proud cosponsors of 2 autumn conferences -- 2009 and, yet to come, 2010.
We're proud that 'Grrls have been invited to speak at other conferences, to contribute scholarship, blog posts, and op-eds, on account of their work here.
Contributing more than 3,000 posts have been nearly 3 dozen permanent IntLawGrrls voices, plus more than 100 women who've joined us as guests. 'Grrls and guests/alumnae have ties to nearly 2 dozen countries in our world. As listed in full in our righthand column, we include, to name a very few, distinguished presidents Lucy Reed and Hélène Ruiz Fabri, distinguished scholars like Mireille Delmas-Marty and Hilary Charlesworth (and so many others), distinguished diplomat Diane Orentlicher, distinguished judges Patricia M. Wald and Marilyn J. Kaman, and distinguished U.N. expert Gay McDougall. And we've been proud over the years to honor no fewer than 70 transnational foremothers -- women who've inspired us, from "A" (Alice Paul) to "V" (Virginia Leary).
To all our contributors and all our readers -- today we will pass the milestone of 400,000 viewings since our founding! -- heartfelt thanks. We look forward to a Year 4 future of sharing lots more good things.

Guest blogger: Catherine Lanctot

IntLawGrrls is delighted to welcome guest blogger Catherine Lanctot (left), Professor of Law at Villanova University Law School in Pennsylvania, where she teaches Constitutional Law, American Legal History, and Legal Ethics. Cathy joined the Villanova faculty in 1988, after several years with the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Her earlier scholarship was in the areas of employment discrimination and legal ethics in cyberspace. As is detailed in her 1st post below, Cathy's now working on the legal history of the 20th century women's suffrage movement, focusing particularly on the militant activities of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. (Thanks to Legal History Blog for the head's up on this scholarly project.)

Cathy dedicates her work to the Brooklyn-born Lucy Burns, who joins other transnational foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from ..." map at right. As Cathy explains in her 2d post below, Burns endured arrests and detention in Britain and the United States in the course of campaigning for women's suffrage.

Side note: In 2007 Cathy took time out from her research project to appear on the game show Jeopardy!, where she was a 5-time winner and later a participant in the Tournament of Champions. After that brief brush with fame and fortune, she reports that she's now "retreated to the relative obscurity of academia!"

Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party: Direct Action in Time of War

Thanks to IntLawGrrls for giving me the opportunity, by means of this guest post, to call attention to the work of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party.

The story of the National Woman's Party and its 1917 picketing campaign on behalf of woman suffrage is almost unknown in legal circles. Yet the suffrage pickets were among the earliest victims of the suppression of dissent that accompanied the entry of the United States into World War I. Nearly forty years before the modern civil rights movement brought the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience to the forefront of American political discourse, the NWP conducted a direct action campaign at the very doorstep of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. And they did so during a time of war.
In the course of this campaign, Paul and her supporters learned to use the apparatus of the municipal courts and the prison system to focus attention on the powerlessness of women, while at the same time elevating their very real suffering to a kind of suffrage martyrdom. Their principal goal was to keep pressure on government officials so that the cause of woman suffrage would not be swept away in the wartime hysteria that gripped the nation in 1917. As the police regularly hauled them off to jail, however, the suffragists began to realize that their ability to pursue that goal hinged largely on the recognition of a constitutional right to free speech.
The working paper I've just posted at SSRN, "We are at War and You Should Not Bother the President": The Suffrage Pickets and Freedom of Speech During World War I, represents the first step in recovering this forgotten story. (This is only a small portion of a much larger work-in -progress on the militant suffrage campaign). In this paper, I present, for the first time, a detailed narrative account of the legal battles of the suffrage pickets of 1917, beginning with the first round of arrests in late June, and concluding with their victory in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in March 1918. Although the women themselves did not directly shape legal doctrine, the saga of the suffrage pickets provides an excellent vehicle for examining the emergence of free speech consciousness during 1917.
Bringing the story of the suffrage pickets to the attention of legal scholars may cause a significant reevaluation of the traditional narrative of First Amendment history. (photo credit for 1917 NWP suffrage picket of White House)

Lucy Burns, transnational foremother

In addition to guest-posting on my suffrage research project, I'd like to add another transnational foremother to those already honored by IntLawGrrls.
My nominee, Lucy Burns (left), is one of many unsung champions of the international suffrage movement. An Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, Burns met Alice Paul -- coincidentally, the transnational foremother of another IntLawGrrls guest blogger, Deborah Popowski -- in London in June 1909. Burns and Paul were under arrest for participating in a suffragette demonstration. During the 6 months that followed, the 2 young women were arrested multiple times for interrupting male politicians with demands for votes for women. In 1910, Paul returned to the United States after a month of grueling forcible-feeding in a London jail; Burns, however, stayed on as an organizer for Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffrage group until 1912.
Upon her return to America, Burns joined Paul and a small group of women in organizing the largest suffrage demonstration in history, timed to coincide with the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in March 1913. After several years of increasingly militant protest, Burns became one of the principal architects of the 1917 picket campaign. She drafted the infamous “Kaiser Wilson” banner, held below right by an unidentified woman, which prompted riots against the suffragists. Later, while in prison for picketing, Burns crafted a petition to authorities making the unprecedented demand that the imprisoned suffragists be treated as political prisoners.
During the “Night of Terror” at the Occoquan, N.Y., workhouse when suffrage prisoners were beaten into submission by prison authorities, Burns spent a night with her arms chained over her head, exhorting her colleagues to remain strong and defiant. (above left; photo credit) She later was forcibly fed during her hunger strike.
After the suffrage years, Burns retired to private life to care for her extended family.
Burns is said to have spent more time in jail for suffrage than any other American woman. Alice Paul described her friend as

about a thousand times more valiant than I, by nature.

We can all be inspired by Burns' steadfast courage and commitment to the cause of equality.

On January 11, ...

... 1885, suffragist Alice Paul was born to "an upper middle-class Quaker family" in Moorestown, New Jersey. Paul (right) attended Swarthmore College and earned a doctorate in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Graduate studies took her to England, where she embraced the militant feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst and associates. Back home in the United States, Paul applied the lessons she'd learned to raise public consciousness on the suffrage issue. She is perhaps best known for unflagging, yet unsuccessful, efforts to have the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced in 1923, become part of the Constitution. In draft, that amendment stated: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex." Paul is an inspiration to IntLawGrrls guest blogger Deborah Popowski.
... 2002, the 1st plane of persons captured during the post-9/11 counterassault in Afghanistan were brought to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they faced indefinite detention, most without charges or trial. (photo credit) As we've posted (39 posts so far!), the camp remains open to this day. About 700 persons, seized not only in Afghanistan but also at other sites in what the U.S. executive calls the "Global War on Terror," have been detained there. The GTMO detainee population has dropped. But it's increased at another offshore U.S. military site -- Bagram, mentioned in my article on Gitmo. The New York Times reported earlier this week:

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.

The American Civil Liberties Union's marking the date with the message at right.

Guest Blogger: Deborah Popowski

Today IntLawGrrls welcomes its 2d guest blogger, Deborah Popowski, author of the above post on accountability, in Argentina and in the United States.
A 3d-year law student at Harvard, Deborah (left), along with fellow student Fernando Delgado, cofounded Stop Torture: The Harvard Anti-Torture Coalition. This Anti-Torture Group's a division of HLS Advocates for Human Rights, a student organization of which Deborah's also co-president. The group provides volunteer support to the Harvard International Human Rights Clinic, coordinates its own projects under faculty supervision, and engages in public education, lobbying, and direct action. Additionally, Deborah's worked on human rights issues in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. She interned for Manfred Nowak, the United Nations' current Special Rapporteur on Torture; for Gitanjali Gutierrez, staff attorney for the Guantánamo division of the Center for Constitutional Rights; and for Justiça Global, a Brazilian NGO that litigates before the Inter-American human rights system.
After receiving a degree in political science and social though from the University of Virginia, Deborah worked in journalism and in international development -- including 2 years' service with the Peace Corps. An Argentina-born naturalized U.S. citizen, she is proficient in 5 languages.
Deborah dedicates her post to her own IntLawGrrls inspiration, the suffragist Alice Paul.
Heartfelt thanks for your contribution, Deborah!