Long way to go in legal academy

Old enough to remember when legal citations eschewed the author's 1st name in favor of 1st initial only?
That style served to obscure the lopsidedness of the legal academy: virtually all the names lurking behind A., B., and C. were men. The mask's largely been lifted, so that each of us today cites in full consciousness of whom we are citing, man or woman. I suspect the change has had good effects, not least among them recognition that women as well as men contribute their voices to this generation of legal scholarship.
Thus even as I celebrated the news that my home institution, the University of California, Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall) is among the Top 25 Law Faculties in Scholarly Impact according to a just-published 2005-2009 survey, I could not but raise a curious eyebrow at the decision of number-cruncher extraordinaire Brian Leiter (prior IntLawGrrls posts here and here) to list the 10 most-cited members of each law faculty by the equation of initial + surname.
A look underneath the veil of that device revealed much:
► In none of the top 25 schools were more than 4 women among the top 10 most-cited scholars, and only 3 of the 25 earned even that scarcely heart-warming 40% rate.
► Double that number -- fully 6 law schools -- do not have a single woman among their top 10 most-cited.
The rest ranged from 1 to 3 women out of 10.
Proud to say that among the women receiving top recognition are 2 IntLawGrrls, Naomi Cahn and yours truly, as well as a number of others whom we've featured in posts: not only my California-Davis colleague Madhavi Sunder, but also Kimberlé Crenshaw, Martha Albertson Fineman, Vicki Jackson, Pamela Karlan, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Martha Minow (left), Rachel Moran, Catharine MacKinnon (bottom left), Martha Nussbaum, Margaret Jane Radin, and Dinah Shelton.
Proud too to see on the list a close law school classmate, Kirsten H. Engel, as well as the only woman professor I had in law school, Carol M. Rose.
Can't help, though, but be concerned about the dearth of women on this list (reflective, no doubt, of the proportion in the academy as a whole, an issue that my deans, Kevin Johnson and Vik Amar, tackle in this new column on need for faculty diversity).
And can't help harbor concern about the fact that not 1 woman is on Brian's list of Ten Most Cited Faculty 2005-2009; indeed, the list drops a full 660 citations to get to the 1st woman (Kathleen Sullivan) below the 10th man (Bruce Ackerman).
In short, still a very long way to go.

Here's the roundup, with 1st as well as last name provided in full:

Most women among top 10 (4 each):
► Arizona (ranked #21): Jean Braucher, Kirsten H. Engel, Toni Massaro, Carol M. Rose (#10 most-cited woman)
► California-Irvine (#9): Catherine Fisk, Elizabeth Loftus, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Rachel Moran
► Michigan (#11): Rebecca Eisenberg, Jessica Litman, Catharine MacKinnon (#4 most-cited woman), Margaret Jane Radin (#7 most-cited woman)

Next most -- 3 women among top 10:
► Georgetown (#20): Julie Cohen, Vicki Jackson, Robin West
► Stanford (#4): Pamela Karlan, Deborah Rhode (#3 most-cited woman), Kathleen Sullivan (#1 most-cited woman)
► UCLA (#15): Kimberlé Crenshaw, Katherine Stone, Lynn Stout
► Vanderbilt (#10): Margaret Blair, Nancy King, Suzanna Sherry

Next next-most -- 2 women among top 10:
► California-Davis (#23): Diane Marie Amann, Madhavi Sunder
► Chicago (#3): Lisa Bernstein, Martha Nussbaum (#5 most-cited woman)
► Emory (#23): Martha Albertson Fineman, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
► George Washington (#18): Naomi Cahn, Dinah Shelton
► Northwestern (#8): Lee Epstein, Dorothy E. Roberts

Only 1 woman among top 10:
► California-Berkeley (#7): Pamela Samuelson
► Columbia (#6): Jane Ginsburg
► Cornell (#11): Valerie Hans
► Harvard (#2): Martha Minow (#2 most-cited woman)
► Illinois (#21): Cynthia Williams
► Penn (#14): Jill Fisch
► Yale (#1): Reva Siegel (#5 most-cited woman)

Not even 1 woman among top 10:
► Duke (#11)
► Florida State (#23)
► Minnesota (#19)
► NYU (#5)
► Texas (#17)
► Virginia (#16)

Perhaps 'nuff said, but thoughts welcome.

Martha Minow, new Harvard Law Dean

Heartfelt congratulations to our colleague Martha Minow, just named the new Dean of Harvard Law School.
She is, as is evident from prior IntLawGrrls posts, the newest addition to the IntLawDean ranks.

Harvard's official announcement rightly describes Martha (right), the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law, as

a distinguished legal scholar with interests that range from international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities.

(photo credit)

Her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998) remains a landmark in the literature of transitional justice. Published just years after the end of the Cold War and the beginning of international human rights enforcement, it's a brilliant study of truth commissions, war crimes trials, and reparations bids in contexts as varied as Latin America and South Africa, Nuremberg and Bosnia. It's been followed by other books also invaluable to to all who care about human rights in this new century, among them the just-published Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (2009), co-authored with her Harvard colleague Jody Freeman.

A member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Martha has played a lead role in “Imagine Coexistence,” a project of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees that works for peaceful coexistence after violent ethnic conflict.

She is also a strong proponent of "Bringing Human Rights Home," not coincidentally the subject of a 2008 Harvard Human Rights Journal symposium in which IntLawGrrl Stephanie Farrior and I had the honor of taking part with her. She's co-directed studies of U.S. responses to recent immigrants, and of public school access for disabled children, and has served on many human rights-related boards.

Martha joined Harvard's law faculty in 1981 after having served as a law clerk to Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan,a master’s in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a law degree from Yale.

As Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said of Martha in announcing the appointment:

'She’s a scholar of remarkable intelligence, imagination, and scope, with a passion for legal education and a deep sense of how the law can serve essential public purposes.'

Scholars state detention changes

Seems everyone has notions these days about how to close the detention camp for terrorist suspects that the Bush Administration opened on January 11, 2002. Some are included in a report by a coalition of more than 20 organizations, entitled Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress. IntLawGrrls’ own Fiona de Londras, in an excellent post, recently offered hers. I’ve my own, too, and will post them in due course. They begin with a pre-eminent concern, on which I posted more than a year ago. In closing Guantánamo as he has promised to do, the new President also must close “Guantánamo” – the abusive policies of detention, interrogation, and rendition now given that metaphoric label even if in point of fact they occur far away from the 45 square miles that comprise the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. (12/08 photo of Camp Justice, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by Diane Marie Amann)
Today’s post is intended to point readers to the Scholars’ Statement of Principles for the New President on U.S. Detention Policy: An Agenda for Change. Drafted by our colleague Catherine Powell, also author of a human rights Blueprint on which we’ve posted, and signed by more than 2 dozen other scholars, among them yours truly, IntLawGrrl Jenny Martinez, and our colleagues Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Sarah H. Cleveland, Deborah Pearlstein, Hope Metcalf, Martha Minow, Judith Resnik, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, and Ruti Teitel. The Statement begins with an explication of how “the existing detention system,” -- “viewed as unprincipled, unreliable, and illegitimate” -- “undermines our national security.” It then sets forth 4 principles on which any new policy ought to be based:
► Observe the rule of law
► Liberty is the norm
► Individualized process
► Transparency
Then follows a host of recommendations for the new administration. As one would expect, it calls on the President to “Close Guantánamo” – to close it in the broader sense. Detainees who can be released are to be released; those should be prosecuted are to be transferred to the United States for prosecution before “established U.S. courts,” and not the military commissions. The Statement urges the Administration to attend to U.S. detention at other sites, “primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It calls for an end to extraordinary rendition, and it admits no tolerance for abuse during detention or interrogation.
In short, the Statement's a document essential to thorough consideration of what to do to undo post-9/11 detention policies.

...and counting...

(Occasional sobering thoughts.) It's been 6 weeks since we last looked at how things stand in Iraq and Afghanistan, the theaters since 2003 and 2001, respectively, of armed conflict between a multistate coalition led by the United States and a myriad of nonstate groops. Story lines noted then continue to dominate. Often heard still is that "the surge" -- a U.S. effort to reduce violence by increasing U.S. troops -- is working.
On a closer look one finds chinks in the armor of that argument.
► Noteworthy in Sunday's Democratic presidential debate was the degree to which candidates responded to the moderator's suggestion that the surge had worked. Sen. Hillary Clinton began with this pushback:

[T]he purpose behind the surge was to create the space and time for political reconciliation, for the Iraqi government to do what only it can do and trying to deal with the myriad of unresolved problems that confront it. ... [B]ut there has not been a willingness on the part of the Iraqi government to do what the surge was intended to do, to push them to begin to make the tough decisions. And in the absence of that political action, 23 Americans dying in December is totally unacceptable.

Gov. Bill Richardson pushed back further:

The policy's a massive failure. Here are the measurements that we should look at: Thirty-nine hundred Americans have lost their lives. There are 60,000 Americans today that are wounded, mainly mentally wounded. Tell that to the family that only 23 died in December.
Look, here are the barometers that we need to look at. First, there is no military solution; there's a political solution. Secondly, has there been progress in any political compromises of reconciliation between the Sunni, the Shi'a and the Kurds? Zero. Has there been progress in sharing oil revenues? Zero. Has there been any regional elections? Zero. Is the Maliki government intensifying its efforts to train the Iraqi
security forces more than they have? No. Is there any end to Iran's efforts to bring terrorist activities to Iraq? No. Iran, Syria -- no one has participated in the regional solution.

Then Sen. Barack Obama joined the pushback:

[T]he bar of success has become so low that we've lost perspective on what should be our long-term national interests. It was a mistake to go in from the start, and that's why I opposed this war from the start.
It has cost us upwards of $1 trillion. It may get close to 2. We have lost young men and women on the battlefield, and we have not made ourselves safer as a consequence.
... [W]e started in 2006 with intolerable levels of violence and a dysfunctional government. We saw a spike in the violence, the surge reduced that violence, and we now are, two years later, back where we started two years ago. We have gone full circle at enormous cost to the American people.

Finally, Sen. John Edwards made pushback a 4-for-4 Democratic position:

[T]he whole purpose for the surge was to create some environment where there could be political progress and political reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'a. ... [E]ven George Bush acknowledges that that's -- that's what we're trying to accomplish. ... I don't believe ... that there will be political progress until we make it clear that we're going to stop propping the Sunni and Shi'a up with American lives and with the American taxpayer dollars.

► Another "barometer," to use Richardson's term, is the question of overall U.S. casualties. That question surfaced during an excellent panel on private military contracting at last weekend's Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, at which law professors Laura A. Dickinson (Connecticut), author of a new ASIL Insight already mentioned in IntLawGrrls, Martha Minow (Harvard), Paul Verkuil (Cardozo), and Steven L. Schooner (George Washington), spoke. Schooner noted that deaths of contractors appear to be going up -- perhaps up to 1 contractor death for every 3 servicemember deaths. The numbers are hard to come by. Neither the Department of Defense nor other contracting departments collect them, leaving researchers to look to loss-of-job-force statistics issued by the Department of Labor. Assuming these gleanings to be accurate, there's reason to think that the drop in servicemember casualties may have been offset by a rise in contractor casualties, with the result that overall U.S. casualties have remained constant.
Missing from all these considerations is the casualty count on which we've focused since starting this "... and counting" series nearly a year ago: (additional post) the number of Iraqi civilians who've died since the 2003 invasion. Here are those numbers: according to Iraq Body Count, between 80,331 and 87,742 Iraqi women, children, and men had died in the conflict -- an increase of between 2,998 and 3,492 deaths in the last 6 weeks, and of 23,451 to 25,129 deaths since we began counting last February.
Regarding servicemembers: by the U.S. Defense Department's figures, as of Sunday 3,911 American servicemembers had been killed in Iraq. Total coalition fatalities: 4,218 persons. (That's 36 servicemember deaths in 6 weeks, all but 1 of them Americans.) The Department stated that 28,661 servicemembers have been wounded, and that 8,691 of them required medical air transport.
Military casualties in the conflict in Afghanistan stand at 476 Americans and 278 other coalition servicemembers, an increase of 7 and 9, respectively, in the last 6 weeks.
No numbers on civilians in Afghanistan; no one seem to keep them.

Teach your children well

In the complicated struggle over history and memory in the wake of grave crimes, school textbooks are a contentious battlefield of late. This weekend's NY Times reported on Congressman Michael Honda's resolution that asks the Japanese government to unequivocally acknowledge and apologize for its history of wartime sex slavery (discussed on IntLawGrrls here, here, and here). Honda, a former schoolteacher, expressed concern about Japanese nationalist politicians' recent success in eliminating references to comfort women from government-approved textbooks. In Honda's words, "It’s insane not to teach your children the truth." A similar battle has been playing out in Cambodia for many years -- the history of the Khmer Rouge has not been taught in classrooms there since 1991. The Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has been pushing since 1999 for schools to discuss the Khmer Rouge regime, recently published the first high school text of the era written by a Cambodian. (You can hear NPR's interview with the author here.) But a Cambodian government review panel refused to approve the book for use in the regular curriculum; one panel member stated that history "should be kept for at least 60 years before starting to discuss it." While this view may be extreme, the history project is a tricky one, given its potential to empower justice at the expense of peace, or to create peace while subverting justice. Moreover, we need not travel far to understand the power and danger of history as a political tool -- the Bush administration's use of the 9/11 tragedy to justify its human rights abuses provides a homegrown example. In the words of Martha Minow:

Rather than substituting one propaganda for another, education about genocide and mass violence should help young people think critically and independently, . . . "to know the past as fact and to confront its implications in ways that make us all seek to change the future for better. If there are no simple answers to the hatred and violence from the past or in the present, there are the countering forces of intellectual honesty, integrity, justice and empathy."