Guest Blogger: Nancy Amoury Combs

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Nancy Amoury Combs (right) as today's guest blogger.
Nancy's the 2009-11 Cabell Research Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, which she joined in 2004 and where she teaches Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law, International Law, and Transitional Justice, all areas on which her scholarship touches. In her guest post below, Nancy discusses her just-published book on fact-finding by international criminal tribunals.
She holds a Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her J.D. is from the University of California-Berkeley, where she served as Articles Editor of the California Law Review and received the Thelin Marrin prize for graduating 1st in her class. After law school, she clerked for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. She also earned a Certificate from the Hague Academy of International Law, and served as legal advisor at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague. Nancy was graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Portland in Oregon.
Along with IntLawGrrls' guests/alumnae Margaret deGuzman, Yvonne McDermott, and Jenia Iontcheva Turner, Nancy serves as an Expert Researcher for the Netherlands-based International Expert Framework on International Criminal Procedure. Our distinguished guest/alumna, Judge Patricia M. Wald, belongs to the IEF Advisory Board.
Before attending university, Nancy owned and operated a chimney sweeping business.
Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Lisa R. Pruitt

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Lisa R. Pruitt (right) as today's guest blogger.
Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall), Lisa's special interests include law and rural livelihoods, feminist jurisprudence, the legal profession, and torts. Her scholarship focuses on cultural differences; in particular, on the range of ways in which rural places are distinct from what has become the implicit urban norm in legal scholarship. Exposed through this research is how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales shape residents' lives, including their encounters the law. Most recently, as described more fully in her guest post below, Lisa has explored how rural spatiality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity; that is, the ways in which rural lives and rural places are enmeshed with law and other forces at both national and global levels.
These are issues that Lisa examines frequently on her Legal Ruralism blog (subtitle: "A Little (Legal) Realism about the Rural"), among the "connections" links in our righthand column.
Lisa earned a Ph.D. in Laws from the University of London, where she was a British Marshall Scholar and wrote a dissertation entitled "A Feminist Reconsideration of the Legal Regulation of Speech." She earned her J.D. and B.A. degrees, both with honors, from the University of Arkanas, Little Rock, where she served as the law review's Editor-in-Chief. She was a law clerk to Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, and a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands. Lisa's pre-academia career included service as a consultant to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, as a legal assistant at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and as associate at Covington & Burling LLP, based in its London office.
Lisa is Chair-Elect of the Section on Women in Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools. Among her honors is to have been selected for the 2002 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, where she presented her article No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination in the South African Legal Profession.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Monica Hakimi

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Monica Hakimi (left) as today's guest blogger.
Monica's an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Her teaching and scholarship focus on public international law, international human rights law, the law of armed conflict, and U.S. foreign relations law. A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York. As a Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, Monica worked on matters relating to nonproliferation, Iraqi reconstruction, international civil aviation, and international claims and investment disputes. She also served as counsel for the United States before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal.
In her guest post below Monica discusses an issue about which she's recently published an article and been quoted in the New York Times; that is, reports of an Obama Administration plan to implement policy of prolonged detention for persons who, though they have been convicted of no crime, are presumed to present security threats.

On May 24

On this day in ...
... 1980, the International Court of Justice rendered its decision in United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran). The court ruled that Iran was responsible for breaches of obligations to the United States -- related to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations -- arising out of the November 4, 1979, takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The court ordered immediate release of the hostages then taken and payment by Iran of reparations to the United States. But the hostages would not be released until January 20, 1981, minutes after the U.S. Presidency was transferred from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. The Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, still in operation at The Hague, then was established to resolve disputes between the 2 countries.
... 1830, the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was published. Its author was New Hampshire resident Sarah Josepha Hale, 42, a lifelong women's rights activist whose novel Northwood (1827) had caused a stir because of its treatment of slavery. In "Mary" Hale turned into verse the true story of one Mary Sawyer, who used to take her lamb to her hometown school in Sterling, Massachusetts. Among the many versions of the song is this one by former Beatle Paul McCartney. (image credit)