Heartfelt welcome to our newest IntLawGrrl, Dina Francesca Haynes

It's our great pleasure today to welcome a new IntLawGrrl, Dina Francesca Haynes (left).
Dina's an Associate Professor of Law at the New England School of Law, where she teaches courses related to immigration, international law and ethics. She has also taught at Georgetown University Law Center, American University’s Washington College of Law, and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Prior to teaching law, she spent a decade practicing international law, including such positions as Director General of the Human Rights Department for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and as Human Rights Advisor to the OSCE in Serbia and Montenegro. She has also worked for the United Nations, serving as a Protection Officer in Croatia with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and in various position in Rwanda and Afghanistan for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. She also was an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in what was then known as the Immigration & Naturalization Service, and she clerked on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Dina earned her B.A. degree at the University of Denver, her J.D. at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and her LL.M. at Georgetown University Law Center. She's the author of Deconstructing the Reconstruction: Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Ashgate 2008). Ethical issues related to the international civil serviceis the subject of her 1st post, below. Other areas of research and writing include immigration law, human rights law, human trafficking, public international law, international organizations, U.N. law, post-conflict reconstruction, humanitarian law, and migration.
She's chosen to dedicate her IntLawGrrls posts to Joan Fitzpatrick (1950-2003), at the time of her passing a leading human rights scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Washington, Seattle. Dina writes of Fitzpatrick (below left):

Joan Fitzpatrick was a brilliant teacher, an internationally renowned scholar and an admired human rights activist who dedicated her life to improving human rights around the world. She was also one of the few female international human rights lawyers practicing when I was a law student, and the only woman I could find then to look up to and emulate. When I took a position as a summer associate with Paul Hoffman at the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles, and I learned that she was working with him on the case to which I’d been assigned, ­Alvarez-Machain (later Sosa), I was thrilled. Her contributions to human rights law, the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, and to forging a path for IntlLawGrrls everywhere were considerable and meaningful, and I am thankful for her work and legacy.

Today Fitzpatrick joins other transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On June 15, ...

... 1907 (100 years ago today), 44 states came together at the Hague for the Second International Peace Conference, convened by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (left) at the urging of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Among the issues to be discussed at the conference, which would continue through October 15, was establishment of a mechanism for peaceful settlement of disputes.
... 1992 (15 years ago today), the U.S. Supreme Court held in United States v. Alvarez-Machain that the fact that U.S. law enforcement agents had effected the U.S. court appearance of a Mexican physician by means of a cross-border kidnapping did not bar his prosecution on federal criminal charges. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for a majority that because the U.S.-Mexico extradition treaty did not forbid forcible abduction, it did not prohibit it, and, moreover, that the method of securing presence at trial did not offend constitutional due process. Dissenting on both scores, Justice John Paul Stevens also argued that the act was contrary to international law. The case drew formal objections not only from Mexico, but also from the United States' neighbor to the north, Canada.