'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'I'm most comfortable wearing slacks, and well, for a woman to come on the floor in trousers was viewed as a seismographic event.'

-- U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (right), recalling her 1st day in the chamber of the Senate, following her election in 1986. The Maryland Democrat's comment came in a CNN.com interview. The occasion?

When she is sworn in for a fifth term in January, Mikulski will become the longest serving woman in Senate history, breaking the 24-year record held by the late GOP Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.

Guest Blogger: L. Song Richardson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome L. Song Richardson (right) as today's guest blogger.

A specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and prosecutorial ethics, Song is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and this semester she's a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Song earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her B.A. in psychology from Harvard College. While at Harvard she earned distinction for her classical piano performances, which included performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before entering academia, Song was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. As a state and federal public defender and private practitioner of criminal defense, she represented defendants in numerous white collar, serious felony, and capital cases. That expertise is evident in Song's guest post below, which exposes a defect in foreign evidence-gathering mechanisms and proposes a solution to the problem.

Song dedicates her post to Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924-2005) who, as Song writes,

in 1968, became the first African American woman elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She became an international figure as a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and, throughout her career, tirelessly championed numerous issues including civil rights, women’s rights and the rights of the urban poor.

In addition, as prior IntLawGrrls posts have noted, Chisholm ran for the highest office in the United States. In her most concerted campaign she entered several Presidential primaries (below left), and received 151.95 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In 1984 Chisholm was trounced in a bid for the Democratic nomination for Vice President by another woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro. Chisholm was not the 1st African American person nominated for President at a major-party convention. As we've posted, that milestone was reached in 1888 by Frederick Douglass, who'd also run for Vice President in 1872 on a minor-party ticket headed by a woman, Presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Nor was Chisholm the 1st woman nominated for President at a major-party convention; as we've also posted, 8 years earlier Margaret Chase Smith had made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nod. Nonetheless, the placement in IntLawGrrls' foremothers list at right of this 1st African American woman to have her name placed in nomination is especially apt on this day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

Presidential Puzzler Answered

Answers to today's Presidential Puzzler above:

1) Frederick Douglass (left). As we've posted, he was nominated for the Presidency at the Republican National Convention in 1888. Benjamin Harrison emerged from that convention as the nominee, and was elected later that year.

2) Margaret Chase Smith (right). As we've posted, she was nominated for the Presidency at the Republican National Convention in 1964. The man who emerged from that convention as the nominee, Barry Goldwater, would lose to Lyndon Baines Johnson in November.

3) Yes. In 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria Claflin Woodhull for President and Frederick Douglass for Vice President. Woodhull (left) and her running mate had no chance; the general election was easily won by Civil War hero and incumbent GOP President Ulysses S. Grant.

On September 13, ...

... 1993, the Oslo Accords on the Middle East were announced at the White House. A "Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank" was signed by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Liberation Organization foreign policy aide Mahmoud Abbas. Onlookers included their superiors, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat, as well as past and present U.S. Presidents. Despite initial successes, the Accords failed to achieve peace in the region.
... 1948, Maine voters elected Margaret Chase Smith (left), then a Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, to the Senate, where she served 24 years, following the death of the incumbent, her husband Clyde. She became the 1st woman to serve in both houses of Congress; her aims were higher, though, as indicated by this note from the website of the Margaret Chase Smith Library:

Senator Smith came to national attention on June 1, 1950, when she became the first member of the Senate to denounce the tactics used by colleague Joseph McCarthy in his anticommunist crusade. Following her "Declaration of Conscience" speech, some pundits speculated that she might be the vice-presidential candidate on the 1952 Republican ticket. The opportunity, however, never materialized. In 1964, Senator Smith pursued her own political ambitions, running in several Republican presidential primaries. She took her candidacy all the way to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where she became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency by either of the two majority parties. In the final balloting, Smith refused to withdraw and so wound up coming in second to the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater.