Guest Blogger: Ruth Wedgwood

We at IntLawGrrls are honored to welcome Ruth Wedgwood (left) as today's guest blogger.
Ruth is the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and the Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at SAIS, the Washington, D.C.-based Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to teaching at SAIS, Ruth has been a Professor at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, and Charles H. Stockton Professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
From 2002 to 2010 she was a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which monitors state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; she's also been an independent expert for International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ruth has served on the Advisory Committee on International Law of the U.S. Department of State, on the Defense Policy Board, and on the CIA Historical Review Panel. She was a U.S. public delegate to Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to the Wehrkunde Munich Security Conference. Among many other professional achievements, she is a founding member of Davos World Economic Forum Council on International Law, and has served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law, on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, as Director of Studies at the Hague Academy for International Law. Currently she is President of the American Branch of the International Law Association; her guest post below seeks participation in and proposals for sessions at ABILA's next annual meeting.
After earning her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal, Ruth served as law clerk to Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before entering academia.
Ruth chooses to honor her great-grandmother, Belle Hamer, who, Ruth writes,

taught school in a one-room school house on the Olympic Peninsula in late 1800s, before Washington was a state ... hardly world historical, but my kind of gal ...

(credit for photo of a circa 1904 one-room schoolhouse in Port Angeles, largest city on the peninsula) Today Hamer joins IntLawGrrls' other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Laura Dickinson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Laura Dickinson (left) as today's guest blogger.
Laura is the Foundation Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.
She joined the ASU law faculty in 2008, having taught previously at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She was a Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University in 2006-2007.
An expert on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law, Laura is the author of Outsourcing War and Peace (2011). This just-published book examines the privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government and its impact on core public values.
During the Clinton Administration, Laura served as a senior policy adviser to Harold Hongju Koh when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Before that, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer and for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and and co-organizer of a Collaborative Research Network on Empirical Approaches to International Human Rights Law, convened under the auspices of the Law & Society Association, Laura is also a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. Her guest post below sets forth the call for papers for an ASIL initiative, the Research Forum for which she serves as a 2011 co-chair.
Heartfelt welcome!

Answers to (Judicial) Diversity Quiz

Answers to the (Judicial) Diversity Quiz above:

(1) Sandra Day O'Connor, educated at Stanford both as an undergraduate and law student. At right is Justice O'Connor's official portrait (note the pink blouse), now hanging in the ground-floor gallery at the Court.

(2) As posted, Ronald Reagan nominated O'Connor in 1981.

(3) Reagan, a 1932 graduate of Eureka College in Illinois, is the last U.S. President not to have attended Harvard or Yale. This differently schooled President also nominated 2 others to the high bench who were not products of Harvard or Yale: Robert H. Bork (University of Chicago; Chicago Law) and Douglas H. Ginsburg (Chicago; Cornell Law). Neither was confirmed. In February 1988 the vacancy was filled by Anthony M. Kennedy (Stanford; Harvard Law), whom Justice Harry Blackmun (Harvard; Harvard Law) thus welcomed to his "good old no. 3" club. The 2005 nomination by President George W. Bush (Yale; Harvard MBA) of another person of diverse schooling, his White House Counsel, Harriet Miers (Southern Methodist University; SMU Law), also failed. (A chronology of all nominations to the Supreme Court is here.)

Bonus question: Charles Evans Whittaker, who served on the Court from 1957 to 1962, earned his law degree in 1924 from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Whittaker served with the Court's next-most-recent-public-university-law-grad, Chief Justice Earl Warren (University of California-Berkeley). Appointing both was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Cleveland to Washington

Kudos to our colleague Sarah H. Cleveland (right), just named Counselor on International Law with the U.S. State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser, headed by our colleague Harold Hongju Koh.

As Counselor, she will give advice on international law issues and help develop U.S. positions in litigation involving international and foreign relations law issues, including human rights cases in U.S. courts.

Since 2007 Sarah's been the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights and Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, and also has taught at Michigan and Harvard law schools and at Oxford University. A former law clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, she was among many scholars who, as posted, signed a December 2008 statement respecting detention policy -- intended for the new administration that she now joins.

Heartfelt congratulations!

IntLawDean Koh tapped to lead "L"

President Barack Obama has nominated our colleague Harold Hongju Koh (right) to be the next Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department.

If approved by the Senate, Koh would succeed John B. Bellinger III, who for the last several years has held the top post at "L," as insiders call State's legal department.

A White House press release issued yesterday noted Koh's many achievements, highlights of which we now detail:

► "Dean and Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School' -- indeed, he is 1 of the IntLawDeans whom we've noted in past posts.

► "Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor" (1998-2001), plus prior service "on the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Public International Law."

► Former law clerk to Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

► Former Attorney-Adviser, Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice.

The list goes on, yet omits important qualifications:

Koh, whose devotion to rights and law is made evident in Storming the Court (2005), a book about litigation that led to the Supreme Court's 1st, and pre-9/11, Guantánamo decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (1993), has been an inspiring colleague and mentor, role model and friend to many of us in the intlaw community.

Heartfelt congratulations!

On November 12

On this day in ...
... 1908 (100 years ago today), Harry Blackmun (right) was born in Nashville, a town in southern Illinois. He grew up in Minnesota, where he practiced law, 1st as a private practitioner and then as in-house counsel to the Mayo Foundation and Mayo Clinic, until 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. From 1970 to 1994 he served as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Blackmun wrote the opinion for the Court establishing a right to privacy with respect to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), and subsequently spent much of the rest of his career defending the judgment. After his death in 1999, his papers were opened to the public at the Library of Congress. An excellent study of his life in light of those papers is Becoming Justice Blackmun (2006) by Linda Greenhouse, who recently retired as the New York Times' Supreme Court correspondent and soon will be a visitor at Yale Law School.

... 1948 (60 years ago today), the International Military Tribunal for the Far East levied sentences of death on 7 Japanese men whom it had convicted of war crimes. "Sixteen others were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the remaining two of the original 25 defendants were sentenced to lesser terms in prison." The prisoners whom the Tokyo Tribunal (left) had condemned would be hanged 6 weeks later. (photo credit)