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.

On September 11

On this day in ...
... 1877, in Budapest, Rosika Schwimmer (left) was born. For years a leader of feminist and peace movements in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, Schwimmer was living in London, "serving as International Press Secretary of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and as correspondent of important European newspapers," when World War I broke out. She worked against the war with other women; among her close associates was Jane Addams. (Addams is the transnational foremother of IntLawGrrls guest Mary Ellen O'Connell, and guest Catherine Lanctot posted this past spring on antiwar efforts of other World War I women.) Schwimmer persuaded a U.S. auto magnate to charter an ocean liner and sail the eponymous Henry Ford Peace Expedition to Europe in late 1915-early 1916. She served as Minister to Switzerland -- making her Hungary's 1st woman ambassador -- after the war. But political turmoil in her home country soon prompted Schwimmer to seek refuge in the United States. There she became embroiled in the legal struggle depicted in the editorial cartoon at right,which ended when the Supreme Court rejected her bid for citizenship in United States v. Schwimmer (1929), on account of her refusal to take up arms in defense of the country. Schwimmer, whom ImmigrationProf Blog recently honored as immigrant of the day, died in New York in 1948. (photo credit; 1928 cartoon credit)
... 2003 (5 years ago today), the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety entered into force. The protocol's intended to supplement the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (logo below left) by "seek[ing] to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by living modified organisms resulting from modern biotechnology. " The protocol has 147 states parties; the United States is not among them. Nor is it among the 191 states parties to the Convention itself.

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.