Guest Blogger: Gráinne de Búrca

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Gráinne de Búrca (left) as a guest blogger.
Gráinne has been Professor of Law at Fordham Law School since 2006. Before that she was Professor of European Union Law from 1998 to 2005 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Lecturer in Law from 1990 to 1998 at Oxford University, England. She has been a Visiting Professor at the law schools of New York University, Columbia, and Harvard.

Gráinne's field of expertise is European Union law, with particular focus on constitutional issues related to European integration, on European human rights law, and on transnational governance. She is the co-editor of the book series Oxford Studies in European Law and the co-author of the textbook EU Law (Oxford University Press 4th ed., 2007).

In her guest post below, Gráinne discusses challenges to European integration by reference to current events and her paper, The Lisbon Treaty No-Vote: An Irish Problem or a European Problem?

Had not Grace O'Malley (in Irish, Gráinne Ni Mháille) not been the very 1st of IntLawGrrls' foremothers, Gráinne would have dedicated her post to that 16th century pirate and transnational nonstate actor. As it is, she's chosen to honor Eva Gore-Booth (below right). Born in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1870, Gore-Booth was a writer-activist involved both in "the Celtic revival that swept over her homeland at the turn of the twentieth century" and the political ferment of the day. (photo credit) Her "poetry, especially such later works as The One and the Many and The Egyptian Pillar," is said to "include themes of social change and sexual liberation." Equally important were her political writings and actions: working with peers like Alice Stopford Green and Esther Roper, Gore-Booth was a pacifist, trade union leader, and equal rights agitator, "one of the first female suffragists to advocate extending the vote to both female property owners and women in the working class." She died from cancer in London in 1926.

Today Gore-Booth joins other Irish-born women -- not only Grace O'Malley, but also Gore-Booth's elder sister, Constance Markievicz, as well as Mary Harris "Mother" Jones -- on the list of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers, just below the "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On January 27

On this day in ...

... 1914 (95 years ago today), "Lacking any military support," Haiti's civilian President, Port-au-Prince lawyer and Senator Michel Oreste, resigned and went into exile aboard a German ship. At once Marines from Germany, France, and the United States landed in Haiti's capital city. A Haitian military leader was installed as President, but his reign also would be short-lived. (map credit)

... 1904 (105 years ago today), in Paris, France, a son was born to an expatriate couple who in a little over a decade would go on to become icons in the Irish revolutionary movement: Irish-born Major John MacBride, whom the British would execute for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, and his wife Maud Gonne, described as "an English-born Irish revolutionary, feminist and actress, best remembered for her turbulent relationship with William Butler Yeats." (Had this IntLawGrrl not chosen a certain 16th C. Irishwoman as her transnational foremother, the nod well might've gone to Gonne, ally of IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras' foremother Countess Markievicz, and the subject of a superb biography by Dr. Margaret Ward.) The couple divorced; their son, Seán Mac Bride, went on to a distinguished global career. Among his achievements: Ireland's Minister of External Affairs and President of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers from 1949 to 1950, a position from which he spearheaded adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights; a cofounder of Amnesty International; Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists; a drafter of the Constitution of the Organization of African Unity; and co-recipient of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize. Following his death in 1988, he was buried in Dublin cemetery near his wife and son -- and his mother. (credit for mid-20th C. photo of Maud Gonne and Seán MacBride)

On November 28, ...

... 1997 (10 years ago today), ethnic Albanian rebels fighting the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic made their 1st public appearance in the uniforms of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The appearance came on a day amid the year's "worst" "ethnic violence across the southern province of Kosovo."
... 1919, the woman who'd been born Nancy Witcher Langhorne 40 years earlier in Danville, Virginia, but who's known now, on account of her 2d marriage, to millionaire Waldorf Astor, as Lady Astor, became the 1st woman elected to a seat that she would assume in the House of Commons. In so doing she assumed the seat of her husband, who'd moved on to the House of Lords. She was not the 1st woman ever elected to Britain's legislature, however; that honor belongs to the Countess Constance Markiewicz, inspiration of IntLawGrrls' own Fiona de Londras. As we've posted, Markiewicz refused to swear the oath of allegiance required in order to take the seat to which she'd been elected in 1918. Lady Astor (1923 illustration at right by John Singer Sargent), who served as a Conservative MP till 1945, was no shrinking violet either, as these quips of hers demonstrate:

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing.
*
I knew what kept me going -- I was an ardent feminist. I always knew we had more moral strength. I once said in the House: We've got moral strength and you've got immoral strength.
*
People who talk about peace are very often the most quarrelsome.
*
My vigor, vitality, and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.

Welcoming IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras

Today Fiona de Londras (right) succeeds Kristine A. Huskey as the newest newcomer to IntLawGrrls blog. As mentioned earlier, de Londras is the mastermind behind ccjhr blog, hosted by the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights at the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, Ireland, where she is a College Lecturer. She's at work on a PhD; its focus, international and comparative approaches to habeas corpus and detainees suspected of terrorism, is the subject of her numerous publications to date.
As she explains below, Fiona's chosen Countess Constance Markievicz as her transnational foremother.
Heartfelt welcome!

Introducing: Countess Markievicz

I’d like to thank Diane and the rest of the IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute to the Blog from the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, here in University College Cork (Ireland). In keeping with the tradition here on the blog I have chosen an ‘international foremother’ as the subject of my first post: Countess Constance Markievicz.
Constance Gore-Booth was born in London in 1868 and acquired her title and her surname when she married a Polish aristocrat. (She's pictured at left at age 18.) Her aristocratic status notwithstanding, however, Markievicz was an egalitarian and an Irish nationalist, having come to live in Ireland as a child (her father was an Anglo-Irish landowner). Although she met her husband while they were both studying in Paris, they settled in Dublin 1903 where she was a successful landscape artist and moved in a circle of Irish literary, artistic and political talent that included William Butler Yeats and Michel Davitt. In 1908 she joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (‘Daughters of Ireland’) and later founded Fianna Éireann in 1909 (an organisation that instructed boys in the use of firearms and paramilitary operations). She later joined the Irish Citizen’s Army (she's in uniform below right) and, by the time the 1916 Rising came around, she was a well-seasoned and well-known member of the Nationalist elite.
Markievicz was a lieutenant in the 1916 Rising commanding troops in St. Stephen’s Green where they held for six days before surrendering having been provided with a copy of Pádraig Pearse’s surrender order. She was then tried for treason and sentenced to death but, unlike the majority of the Easter 1916 leadership, she was spared execution because she was a woman. On commutation of sentence she is reported to have retorted to the Court “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me”.
In 1918 she was elected to Dáil Eireann (the lower house of parliament). Although she was the first woman parliamentarian elected in the British Empire she refused to take her seat (all parliamentarians were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown). She was present at the founding of Fianna Fáil (Ireland’s dominant political party) in 1926 and was once more elected to the Dáil the next year. This time she planned to take her seat under Fianna Fáil policy but she died before the Dáil was called.
Markievicz was a terrorist to some and a freedom fighter to others, but above all she was an early example of female engagement in nationalist struggles and in parliamentary politics. Ireland now has an exceptionally low percentage of female elected representatives and it is perhaps worth recalling that we were one of the first electorates to vote a woman into a parliamentary position. Markievicz may have been an odd mixture of privilege, aristocracy and eccentricity but her role in Ireland’s history is an enormously influential one. Thus, with some circumspection about her methods and not a little pride in the results she helped to attain, I introduce Constance Markievicz to IntLawGrrls, to join Grace O’Malley and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones as Irish women of legal and political influence.