Guest Blogger: Larissa van den Herik

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Larissa van den Herik (left) (photo credit) as today's guest blogger.
Larissa's an Associate Professor of Public International Law on the Faculty of Law at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where she also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law. She has previously worked at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she defended her Ph.D. thesis, published in 2005 as The Contribution of the Rwanda Tribunal to the Development of International Law. She was awarded the Bulthuis Van Oosternieland Prize for this academic work. In 2007, Larissa received a 3-year grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to do research on the responsibility of corporations and individual businessmen, with respect to illegal trade, during times of armed conflict.
In addition to her work at the Leiden Journal, Larissa is a member of the Editorial Board of Internationale Spectator, a commentator of the Dutch International Crimes Act, and annotator for the International Law in Domestic Courts Project, a joint undertaking of the Oxford University Press and the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include several articles and casenotes in the fields of public international law, international criminal law and the law on peace and security. Her guest contribution serves as a timely complement to last week's post by Valerie Oosterveld regarding the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor: in her post below, Larissa analyzes a recent case in which the Dutch justice system eventually acquitted a Dutch national accused of illegally trading arms to fuel Liberia's civil war. Larissa's post is based on her article published earlier this year in the International Criminal Law Review, a 9-year-old journal on whose board of editors yours truly is proud to serve. ICLR the brainchild of its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Michael Bohlander, formerly a judge in Germany and a Senior Legal Officer of a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and now Professor at England's Durham Law School.
Larissa dedicates her post to Hannah Arendt (below right) (photo credit). Of this philosopher and commentator on international criminal justice, about whom we've posted in the past, Larissa writes:

Nowadays her observations on the banality of evil are more well-accepted, but she had the wisdom to coin the term and the audaciousness to share her brilliant but also disturbing thoughts with the public. Equally her insight that the Holocaust explodes the limits of the law should ensure that we, lawyers, remain modest and that we realise that ultimately, law with all its technicalities is quite inadequate as a means to fully and comprehensively come to terms with collective crimes, such as genocide and crimes against humanity (even though it may at times be the best of all options).

Arendt joins other IntLawGrrls in the foremothers' list just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Why subject legal thought to SurveyMonkey?

Regarding the most-influential-legal-thinker poll that Fiona describes below, the devious among us might wonder whether Brian made his entered-profession-by-1960s cutoff with the devilish purpose of generating feminist buzz.
On reading it last night I myself set to pounce -- to e-mail Brian to find out how Catharine A. Mackinnon (right), to name one unquestionably influential 20th C. legal thinker -- had been omitted. Alas, I learned from WikiPedia that though she's but a few years younger than nominee Bruce Ackerman, she seems not to have earned her J.D. till well after him. No surprise; later entry into one's profession is a hallmark of women's progess.
Even considered within its own time frame, the poll is sadly Anglo-Amero-centric. In a comment to Fiona's post Hannah Arendt (left) was rightly nominated by our colleague Kevin Jon Heller. In global circles the name of my colleague Mireille Delmas-Marty (below) surely would surface. I know others will have other names.
There are so many women and men who've influenced our legal thinking. Do we really need one man's list to tell us who they are?

21st C. turn of an Arendtian phrase

"Memo to the next president" is the title of Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten's commentary about how hard it will be for the administration that takes office on January 20, 2009, to get the United States out of the complex mess that's typically subsumed within the single word "Guantánamo" -- how hard it will be, that is, for the United States to pull back from abusive rendition-and-detention-for-interrogation policies pursued since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and yet to work effectively to combat terrorism. Essential to Rutten's exposé is a critique of "torture memos" like those discussed in posts here and here. He writes:

America's version of banal evil lurks in the bloodless abstractions of mid-level lawyers, rather than in the gray efficiency of faceless bureaucrats.

The reference, of course, is to a term coined fully 45 years ago, in the trial reportage compiled into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (left). As described in this post, Banality philosopher Hannah Arendt's account of that early effort by a nation-state, Israel, to prosecute an individual in its national courts for internationally condemned crimes. In describing actions "so obscene in their nature and consequences" as "'banal,'" it's explained here, Arendt

meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. ...

For a time after 9/11, the use of words from a totalitarian past to describe the American present instant sparked controversy. Recall, for example, the furor in 2005 over Amnesty International's characterization of detention practices as an "American gulag." That harsh criticism now receives due consideration in the mainstream media -- indeed, as in Rutten's case, is set forth in the mainstream media -- is an advance in our avowedly open society. But that there remains cause for that criticism is no advance at all.

Eradicating abusive policies and, at least as importantly, the institutional structures within which they found root, indeed must be a priority item on the next President's to-do list.

(cross-posted at Slate's Convictions blog)

On October 14, ...

... 1906, Hannah Arendt, among "the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century," was born in Hanover, Germany, to secular parents of Jewish ancestry. Forced by Nazism to flee in 1933, she lived in Paris until immigrating in 1941 to the United States, where she held academic positions till her death in 1975. Works of particular interest to international law include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), recently republished with a foreword by Samantha Power, as well as the New Yorker dispatches from the Jerusalem trial that served as the basis for her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (1950 photo of Arendt courtesy of Library of Congress)
... 1981, a call for independent inquiries was made by Amnesty International (logo at left) into a number of cases in which, it asserted, "the Federal Bureau of Investigation fabricated evidence and used other means to put leaders of black, Indian and other American minority groups behind bars" for life. Concern with the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) center on Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a Black Panther Party leader convicted of a California robbery-muder in 1972, and Richard Marshall, an American Indian Movement leader convicted of a South Dakota barroom killing in 1976. Proof of tainting of evidence would result in Pratt's release 12 years later.

On June 24, ...

... 1941, Julia Kristeva was born in Sliven, Bulgaria. In her 20s she moved to Paris, where she has lived ever since. Schooled in linguistics and psychoanalysis, for decades she has been a leader in feminism, semiotics, and cultural theory. Among her works is a 1977 essay, "Women's Time," and a 1999 study of Hannah Arendt, both included in The Portable Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver.
... 1968, authorities shut down Resurrection City (above), a shantytown built on the Mall in Washington, D.C., just weeks after the April assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , and occupied by "poor people -- mostly black, some Hispanic and Native American, and a handful of whites -- from across the country."

On May 23, ...

... 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was established, and its Parliamentary Council promulgated the Grundgesetz ("Basic Law"), which declares in Article 1: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." Aspects of this Constitution were amended in 1990, when, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall the preceding year, the eastern part of the country, which had been part of the Soviet bloc since the end of World War II, reunited with its western half.
... 1960, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced the capture of the mastermind of the deportation of 3 million Jews to concentration camps during the Nazi era, Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been seized in Argentina, where he was living under an assumed name. As depicted at left and reported in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt, Israel eventually put Eichmann on trial for crimes against the Jewish people; he was convicted and hanged. His kidnapping by Israeli agents prompted diplomatic protest from Argentina; the U.N. Security Council settled the dispute by resolution. A California-based member of Congress now is citing Eichmann to justify extraordinary renditions, the Bush Administration's post-September 11 policy of extralegal seizures of terrorism suspects.