Go On! "Law & Memory"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

Law and Memory is the subject of a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the University of Southern California Center for Law, History and Culture, to be held February 25 and 26, 2011, at the USC Gould School of Law, 699 Exposition Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Organizers write:

While scholarship on history and memory has exploded in recent years, and much of it has centered on the role of trials and other legal processes in shaping collective memory, only recently has work in the new field of law and humanities begun to explore the intersections of law and memory more self-consciously.

Law as a means to remember or forget the past will be examined not only by jurists, but also by scholars of history, psychology, literature, communications and cultural studies. Keynote speaker will be Robert W. Gordon (Yale, Stanford), the keynote speaker. Among the many others taking part will be IntLawGrrls Elizabeth Hillman (Hastings) and guest/alumna Mary L. Dudziak (USC) (hat tip), as well as Elaine Scarry (Harvard), Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard), and Cheryl Harris (UCLA).

There's a nominal fee for attendees; registration and program details here.

On November 15

On this day in ...
... 1866, Cornelia Sorabji (right) was born into a family of 9 children in what was then called the Bombay Presidency in India. Her father was a Parsi Christian missionary; her mother, the founder of schools for girls. Following her own education in India, in 1892, Sorabji was specially permitted to take the examination for a Bachelor of Civil Laws Oxford University -- the 1st woman ever to do so. She returned to India 2 years later and began a career concentrated on changing laws that discriminated against women. Among her many books were Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by One of Themselves (1908) and India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India's First Woman Barrister (published posthumously in 2001). After retirement she moved to London, where she died in 1954. As IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Mary Dudziak posted recently at her Legal History Blog, Sorabji's life is the subject of an article by Professor Mary Jane Mossman of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, Canada.


(Prior November 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

Princeton law fellowships

The Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, whose Director is our colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, is seeking applications from outstanding faculty, independent scholars, lawyers, and judges for up to 6 residential LAPA Fellowships to be awarded for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Past Fellows include many international or comparative law scholars, including a number of IntLawGrrls' guests/alumnae: Jeannine Bell (prior posts), Mary L. Dudziak (prior posts), Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (prior posts), and Diane Orentlicher (prior posts).
Successful candidates for the 2011-2012 awards will conduct substantial research on topics broadly related to legal studies. Among the Fellows will be 4 general Fellows, 1 Microsoft/LAPA Fellow specializing in intellectual property or the legal regulation of the economy, and 1 Mellon/LAPA Fellow specializing in law and the humanities.
Applicants must have a doctorate, J.D., or equivalent postgraduate degree.
Details and the online application form are available here. Deadline is 5 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, November 8, 2010.

'Nuff said

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

Comparative sideglances can sometimes aid us in deciding not only what we should do, but what we should not do. A notable example: In the 'Steel Seizure Case' decided by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1952, Justice Jackson, in his separate opinion, pointed to features of the Weimar Constitution in Germany that allowed Adolf Hitler to assume dictatorial powers. Even in wartime, Jackson concluded, the U.S. President could not seize private property (in that case, the steel mills). Such a measure, in good times and bad, the Court held, required congressional authorization.
At the time Justice Jackson cast a comparative sideglance at Weimar Germany, the United States itself was a source of 'negative authority' abroad. The Attorney General pressed that point in an amicus brief for the United States filed in Brown v. Board of Education, the public schools desegregation case decided in 1954. Urging the Court to put an end to the 'separate but equal doctrine,' the Attorney General wrote:
'The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination . . . raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.'

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on "The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication," in what SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston termed "a rare commentary by a member of the Supreme Court on Senate hearings for a potential colleague." He refers, of course, to the broadsides that some Senators aimed at nominee Elena Kagan (prior post). Ginsburg's comments were part of a speech she delivered yesterday at the XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law, about which IntLawGrrl Afra Afsharipour posted earlier this week. (hat tip: Jess Bravin) (The role of foreign context in the school desegregation litigation is, incidentally, a key aspect of the scholarship of IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Mary Dudziak.)

An interesting added note in Ginsburg's full speech, available here: her reference to judges' consultation of "any number of legal blogs." Hmmm....

Newly Courted?

The nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court already has inspired, among much other press:

► Fiona's thoughtful consideration of constitutional and human rights protection;

► My own reading of intlaw tea leaves; and

► The Supremes and the Single Girl, which our guest/alumna Mary L. Dudziak posted at her own Legal History Blog.

It's also prompted thoughts about how having 3 women might affect the 9-member Court.

"Women do bring different life experiences to the court," our honored guest/alumna, Judge Patricia M. Wald, wrote in the series she published here last fall. It's a point that other IntLawGrrls also have explored, many in posts (available here) on the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor last summer.

Surely, having a bench that's 1/3 women would place America's highest court closer to a global forefront regarding representation. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself has noted, 4 out of the 9 Justices on Canada's Supreme Court are women. And a number of international tribunals have a significant mix of genders -- in some cases, like that of the International Criminal Court, where 10 of 19 Judges are women, by decree of statute. Truth be told, however, women lag elsewhere. At the United States' southern border, the Supreme Court of Mexico lists only 2 Ministras out of 11 members. On Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, 3 out of 16 Judges are women; on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (prior post), 1 out of 12 Justices; and on France's Conseil Constitutionnel, 1 woman out of 11 membres.

A likely consequence that gets less attention is one that might in the end have the greatest effect on our profession: opening seats for women on the high bench may in in turn open space for women to act as advocates before that same bench. Our colleague Pamela Harris, organizer of the Georgetown Law conference about women and the Supreme Court on which we posted last month, told The New York Times:

'If clients are visualizing the court as a predominantly male entity, they are going to want a lawyer who looks like the people on the bench. I think this could also be a critical moment in terms of women arguing before the Supreme Court.'

Tea leaves on Kagan & international law

How will President Barack Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court treat issues of foreign, international, comparative, or transnational law?
As with many other areas respecting the judicial potential of Elena Kagan (left) (prior posts), this one is tabula rasa.
Kagan, who seems likely to succeed in her bid to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens (at right in bottom photo), has among the sparsest written record of public writings of any nominee in decades.
Consideration of the question of Kagan and intlaw thus requires resort to reading tea leaves.

Leaf No. 1: Marshall Clerk
► Among the judgments issued during Kagan's OT '87 clerkship for Justice Thurgood Marshall was Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), in which international context played a role in the Court's holding that execution of a 15 year old would violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The controlling plurality opinion stated (footnotes omitted):

The conclusion that it would offend civilized standards of decency to execute a person who was less than 16 years old at the time of his or her offense is consistent with the views that have been expressed by respected professional organizations, by other nations that share our Anglo American heritage, and by the leading members of the Western European community. Thus, the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute have formally expressed their opposition to the death penalty for juveniles. Although the death penalty has not been entirely abolished in the United Kingdom or New Zealand (it has been abolished in Australia, except in the State of New South Wales, where it is available for treason and piracy), in neither of those countries may a juvenile be executed. The death penalty has been abolished in West Germany, France, Portugal, The Netherlands, and all of the Scandinavian countries, and is available only for exceptional crimes such as treason in Canada, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Juvenile executions are also prohibited in the Soviet Union.

As I've written here, that passage, written by Justice Stevens, set the stage for the debate over consultation of foreign context, one that continues to this day. It's impossible to find out from my Pacific Coast perch what, if any, role Kagan, 1 of 3 TM clerks that year, played in Justice Marshall's decision to join Stevens' opinion.
Kagan appears never herself to have written about the advisability vel non of consultation -- a practice that, as posted, then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor (far right) was constrained to rebuke in her quest last year to become a Justice. But Kagan surely knows of the debate. Indeed, though she offered no thoughts of her own on the matter, Kagan invited Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (near right) to rise to the defense of the practice during an interview published as "Remarks Commemorating Celebration 55: The Women's Leadership Summit," 32 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 233, 237 (2009).
► The term "foreign experiences" does surface in "For Justice Marshall," 71 Texas Law Review 1125 (1993), Kagan's tribute to her then-just-departed Boss. She recalled the penchant Marshall (below left) had for telling stories -- not only of his work as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in America, but also of his ventures overseas. (As posted, the best account of the latter is by IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Mary L. Dudziak.) Kagan wrote:

When Justice Marshall was investigating racial discrimination in the military in Korea, a soldier demanded that he provide a password; the hulking (and, of course, black) Marshall looked down at the soldier and asked, 'Do you really think I'm North Korean?' And when assisting in the drafting of the Kenyan Constitution, the Justice was introduced to Prince Philip. 'Do you care to hear my opinion of lawyers?' Prince Philip asked in posh British tones, mimicked to great comic effect by Justice Marshall. 'Only,' Justice Marshall replied -- before the two discovered mutual ground in a taste for bourbon -- 'if you care to hear my opinion of princes.'

Here's the lesson that Kagan said she drew from such stories:

They were a way of showing us foreign experiences and worlds, and in doing so, of reorienting our perspectives on even what had seemed most familiar. And they served another function as well: they reminded us, as Justice Marshall thought all lawyers (and certainly all judges) should be reminded, that behind law there are stories -- stories of people's lives as shaped by law, stories of people's lives as might be changed by law.

Leaf No. 2: Legal Scholar
► No reference to foreign, comparative, transnational, or international law/context appears in any of the half-dozen or so articles that Kagan authored or coauthored while a professor at Chicago and Harvard.

Leaf No. 3: Harvard Law Dean
► Among the most-remarked features of Kagan's tenure as Harvard Law's 1st woman dean was her recruitment of numerous conservatives, among them Jack L. Goldsmith, a Bush Administration lawyer post-9/11 and author of an Office of Legal Counsel memorandum ably criticized by José E. Alvarez in "Torturing the Law" and Leila Nadya Sadat in "Ghost Prisoners and Black Sites: Extraordinary Rendition Under International Law," at pages 175 and 309, respectively, of 37 Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (2006).
► Kagan also oversaw the introduction into the mandatory 1L curriculum of a class "that looks at law in a comparative or international framework," an innovation she discussed in "The Harvard Law School Revisited," 114 Green Bag 2d 475 (2008):

The courses in comparative law are opening up new questions and possibilities, showing choices made by different societies and challenges that arise from globalization, while also helping every student to locate American law in the larger map of laws, politics, and histories across the world.

Leaf No. 4: Solicitor General
► Kagan's 14-month stint as the United States' top Supreme Court lawyer has been distinguished mostly by the fact that she's the 1st woman in the post. (It's her 2d turn in the Executive Branch; not much seems to have been written yet about her couple years in the Clinton White House.) Kagan's 1st oral argument before the Court came last September in Citizens United v. FEC; she failed to persuade a majority to sustain a federal statute regulating corporate spending on elections.

Here's a sampling on cases with a transnational angle:

► In Samantar v. Yousuf (a pending case on which we've posted here, here, and here), Kagan, along with State Department Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh, signed an amicus brief on behalf of Alien Tort Statute plaintiffs, who're seeking affirmance of a lower-court ruling denying sovereign immunity to a former Somali official.

► During her confirmation hearings and since, Kagan's SG office has called for robust executive power in the campaign against terrorism (and see here). That fact should not surprise anyone who remembers the Clinton DOJ.

In short, a mixed bag. Perhaps the best answer to the question posed at the top is one implicit in a speech by Justice Stevens, whose own approach to transnational matters evolved, as I've written here. Stevens' speech, published at 74 Fordham Law Review 1561 (2006), was delivered in 2005, almost immediately after he'd administered the oath of office to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. (above).

Applied to present context, the underlying question is this:

What will Justice Kagan be open to learning on the job?

Such on-the-job learning, Stevens said, is

'essential to the process of judging.'

Gitmo 'Grrls

(One in a series on Experts at Law)

As mentioned in our recent Read On! Review, a recurrent theme in IntLawGrrl Kristine A. Huskey's new book is, to quote her,

the fact that women are woefully scarce in national security law, my chosen field. I do not mean to convey that I am the only woman in this field, as there are many women writing, speaking about, and practicing nationalsecurity legal issues, specifically relating to Guantánamo ...

She continued:

[E]very one of these women will tell you that they, too, are often the only female speaker on these issues in a conference room or on a panel filled with men. The world can stand to have more women in fields that are traditionally filled by men.

(pp. iv-v) Kristine then proceeded "to name a few" of the Gitmo 'Grrls who jumped to mind. Her list is reproduced here, along with links to these women and some of their works:

► IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack, Santa Clara Law. Her IntLawGrrls posts are here; list of other publications is here.

► IntLawGrrl yours truly (thanks, Kristine!), University of California, Davis. My IntLawGrrls posts are here; list of other publications is here.

► Leila Nadya Sadat, Washington University. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; publications list is here.

► Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney for detainees. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; her op-ed is here.

► Agnieszka M. Fryszman, partner at Cohen Milstein, attorney for detainees.

► Beth Gilson, attorney for detainees.

► H. Candace Gorman, attorney for detainees, whom the Chicago Tribune recently profiled. She runs 2 Gitmo blogs, here and here.

► Sylvia Royce, attorney for detainees.

► Sarah Havens, Allen & Avery, attorney for detainees.

► Becky Dick, attorney for detainees.

► Hina Shamsi, staff attorney at the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her ACLU blog posts are here.

► Maria LaHood, Center for Constitutional Rights.

► Opinio Juris' Deborah Pearlstein, Princeton University. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; her OJ posts are here; her publications list is here.

► Karen J. Greenberg, New York University. IntLawGrrls posts about are her here; some publications are listed here; her newest Gitmo book is here.

► Suzanne Spaulding, Bingham Consulting Group and former Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorism, among many other natsec posts. An op-ed by her is here.

► Kate Martin, Center for National Security Studies. Some of her publications are here.

► Sahar Aziz, formerly an associate at Cohen Milstein, now Senior Policy Advisor at Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

► Barbara Olshansky, attorney for detainees. Her books are here.

► Jennifer Daskal, formerly senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, now a Department of Justice attorney.

Recognition is due to many other women as well, of course. (Readers' nominations welcome!)

There are, for example, all the IntLawGrrls and guests/alumnae who have contributed posts in IntLawGrrls' "Guantánamo" series. In addition to Beth, Kristine, and I, they are Elena Baylis, Ursula Bentele, Fiona de Londras, Monica Hakimi, Lynne Henderson, Elizabeth L. Hillman, Dawn Johnsen, Michelle Leighton, Pamela Merchant, Naomi Norberg, Hari M. Osofsky, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Lucy Reed. Not to mention guests/alumnae Mary L. Dudziak, editor of this book, and Mary Ellen O'Connell, interviewed here, both with respect to post-9/11 issues. Or my University of California colleague Laurel E. Fletcher, co-author of this book, an empirical study of the fate of ex-detainees.

And there are also the women who shared a Quonset-like tent with Jen Daskal and me during the December '08 week that, as posted earlier, I spent observing Gitmo military commissions on behalf of the National Institute of Military Justice. (A fuller account of my visit begins at page 9 of this report, which also includes dispatches from Executive Director Michelle Lindo McCluer and other NIMJ'ers) These tentmates were: Jill Heine, Amnesty International; Stacy Sullivan, Human Rights Watch; and Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First. And don't get me started on the many women journalists I met at Gitmo, or on the women JAG lawyers whom I watched provide excellent representation of various detainees as detailed defense counsel.

Bottom line -- memo to media reps, conference organizers, anthology editors, etc.:

There are many, many women now working in the field of national security. We've given you the list; it's your job to get in touch. As we posted when a similar issue arose years ago, the key is not only having women "in" the supposedly nontraditional fields of law. It's also having them recognized as being there.

On July 7

On this day in ...
... 1907, Susie Marshall Sharp was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The only woman in her Class of 1929 at the law school of the University of North Carolina, Sharp joined her father's law practice upon graduation. Her appointment as a Superior Court judge in 1949 prompted the following exchange:

... Tom Bost of the Greensboro Daily News questioned 'what would happen if Sharp was faced with trying a case of rape? Wouldn't that be too much for a woman?' Judge Sharp wrote back that 'In the first place, there could have been no rape had not a woman been present, and I consider it eminently fitting that one be in on the "pay-off".'

In 1974 Sharp became the 1st woman chosen by the electorate to serve as Chief Justice of her state's Supreme Court. As IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Mary Dudziak recently posted at her Legal History Blog, the life of this pathbreaking jurist is the subject of the new biography depicted above right, Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp by attorney/author Anna R. Hayes. Sharp retired from the bench in 1979 and died in 1996.
... 1960, via Resolution 142, the U.N. Security Council unanimously recommended admission as a member state to the United Nations for the country then known as Republic of Congo, with the city then known as Léopoldville as its capital. Both the country and the capital would undergo name changes: today the former is the Democratic Republic of Congo (known as Zaire for an interim period); the latter, Kinshasa. (credit for Congo coat of arms circa 1960)

(Prior July 7 posts are here and here.)

CIL in U.S. courts

Mary L. Dudziak, IntLawGrrls guest/alumna and founder of Legal History Blog, alerts us to a debate on how courts within the United States historically have treated the law of nations -- that is, customary international law. The dueling articles are here and here.

Write On! Law & Society Association

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) It's time to prepare forthe next annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, to be held May 28-31, 2009, in Denver, Colorado.

The just-released call for participation seeks proposals for papers or panels on the theme of The theme will be "Law, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century." It's a topic that invites many avenues of inquiry; for instance:

► Has the use of law advanced or inhibited individual and group rights?

► Have new understandings of the intersection of social statuses changed our understanding of the role of law in producing or reducing inequality?

► What has been the role of new, non-state forms of governance in the production of inequality?

► Should law and social science provide the expertise to stimulate and inform the impending social agenda?

► Should social scientists and lawyers become allies to address these pressing problems, and if so, how should they collaborate?

Proposals are due December 8, 2008; details here and at Legal History Blog, whose founder, IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Mary L. Dudziak, serves on the Program Committee.

Guest Mary L. Dudziak on women blogging

It's IntLawGrrls' honor today to feature as our guest Mary L. Dudziak (right).
Mary, about whom we've posted frequently, is among America's leading legal historians, the author most recently of Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (2008), and is at work examining war's impact on American law and politics. The Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Law School, Mary is a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Maryland School of Law and an Affiliated Scholar at Harvard University's Warren Center for American History.
She's also the founding mother of one of my daily must-read websites, Legal History Blog. Mary's great work there inspired IntLawGrrls. And her help along the way -- like her decision to feed our most recent headlines onto her own blog -- has sustained us since our IntLawGrrls' gestation and birth more than a year and a half ago. In her guest post below, which we've reposted from LHB with her permission, Mary surveys recent "Do Women Blog?" queries. She then offers practical tips on how women can give voice to other women; my own thoughts are also below.

Heartfelt welcome!

Women & blogging: What you can do right now

(A guest post from Mary L. Dudziak)

It was hard to know what to say a while back when a law blogger asked "Do Women Blog?" a week before the women bloggers convention. I just kept blogging.

Northern California-based author C.C. Holland now has an article on Law. Com, "Where Are All the Female Bloggers?"

Thankfully, she quotes University of Illinois Law Professor Christine Hurt (left) of Conglomerate, a business/law/economics/society blog, who has been insisting for some time that it is hard to say anything meaningful about gender and the blogosphere without data. And basic data would not be hard to find.
The point I stressed to Holland, as she reports in the article, is:

Someone asking, in some ways hyperbolically, 'Do women blog?' is not reading the blogging that women are doing.

There are lots of women bloggers, including law bloggers. But it can be hard to break out of a particular niche and into the broader blogosphere. For good bloggers without a natural audience, it can be very hard to establish a readership.
The difficulty of establishing a readership is exacerbated when bloggers don’t read and link to women bloggers.
This is not unlike a problem in legal scholarship that Georgetown Law Professor Mari Matsuda (right) wrote about some time ago. In a critique of the Critical Legal Studies movement, she argued in 1987 that

there is a sense that critical scholars intend only to talk to each other. ... The articles cite and build upon each other.

She encouraged CLS scholars to

establish dialogue with people of color and to add their voices to those that currently dominate the discourse.

There was (and still is) a very practical way to do that: cite to their work.
Just as legal scholarship can sometimes be a closed circle, the law blogosphere functions that way when established bloggers read and link to each other, ignoring newer voices.
Rather than speculating about women and blogging, here are some very practical and easy things to do that can highlight the role of women bloggers, and make it easier for newer voices to be heard:
For bloggers
► 1. Take a look at your blog list. If you don’t have women bloggers on your bloglist, how about adding some today? For starters, some blogs by women are listed on the essential Feminist Law Professors Blog.
► 2. Link to women. Moving up in rankings like Technorati depends on how many blogs link to you. Sometimes another blogger will pick up on a point I’ve made, but doesn’t add a link to my post. This seems to be part of the ABCs of blog etiquette. But why not go beyond this and look for posts by women you can link to?
► 3. Help spread the word. When you hear about new bloggers, give them a shout-out. And feature established blogs that might be of interest to your readers.
► 4. Why not add the feed from another blog to your blog? I do this with the fabulous international law blog IntLawGrrls. I added their feedburner feed to the side of my blog for two reasons: there are often posts that are historically oriented that my legal history readers will be interested in, and I think it’s a great blog and I want to support it.
For readers
You have a part in this, since the blogosphere consists of the relationship between bloggers and readers. When you find a post by women, or any blogger who can use more exposure, why not e-mail it to others? Blog readership is often built up by word-of-mouth (or word-of-keyboard).
For women bloggers and new bloggers
A little shameless self-promotion is in order. Certainly send an e-mail about your blog launch to everyone you can think of. Then send an occasional post, with a link, to folks who might have an interest, and especially to relevant listservs that you are a member of. Everyone who has gone before you has built a readership by doing just that.
University of Wisconsin Law Professor Ann Althouse (above right), author of Althouse blog, offers her thoughts on the topic here. And at Feminist Law Professors Blog, University of Southern California Law Professor Ann Bartow (left) weighed in on this topic earlier here.

(Original appeared at Legal History Blog, cross-posted at Balkinization blog. More thoughts on this subject below.)

In the pink

Do Women Blog?
Yes.
More difficult is the question that Mary L. Dudziak raises in her guest post above:
If yes, why do their voices not register as loudly and clearly as those of men?
Because.
There are many reasons, historical, cultural, temporal, perhaps even temperamental. It's no frivolous question. Cyberspace is legal writing's new frontier. We need to know about perceived gender inequality there no less than anywhere else. We risk slippage of what equal footing exists in law and the academy if we don't understand this new terrain. Genuine empirical research on these matters would be genuinely welcome.
Meanwhile, we can follow the lead of Dudziak -- an IntLawGrrls' inspiration -- and make our own change now.
► More scholars -- women and men -- need to give recognition to more women. Even in our more traditional scholarship, we aren't always good about citing to other women. Even when more contemporary options are available, there seems a tendency to choose an old reliable name as authority for some legal chestnut. But by reaching back to an earlier, less gender-balanced era, we shrink the pool of women we might cite.
► We need too to invite and encourage women colleagues to give voice to their thoughts, not only in virtual spaces but also the physical space of academic conferences.
Here at IntLawGrrls, we're proud to do our unabashedly pink part. Are you doing yours?

Marriage in California

The California Supreme Court yesterday unanimously denied a petition for extraordinary relief that would have removed the anti-same-sex marriage initiative from the November 2008 ballot (here is the Court's marriage cases site).
The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) argued in its petition that the initiative, which would strip same-sex couples of the right to marry, is such a significant change in the California Constitution that it constitutes a revision, not a mere amendment, to the Constitution and therefore requires a more deliberative democratic process before being presented to voters. (credit for images) If passed, the measure would strip a fundamental right from a specified minority – which is just the sort of majoritarian action that courts, not electorates, are best positioned to reckon with. Donna Ryu, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, wrote an amicus letter in support of the NCLR that garnered the signatures of many California law professors (including me – and our Legal History Blog colleague, Mary Dudziak). Unfortunately, the Court did not address the merits of the petition.
For me, having recently moved into the democratic chaos of California, this issue has more resonance than most. First, the extended oral argument triggered media coverage and lengthy commentary (Hastings ran a live feed of the hours of argument in a room open to the public, followed by a panel of professors analyzing the case). Then the release of the momentous decision brought dozens of ecstatic phone calls and celebratory emails from family-law professors and friends who support same-sex marriage rights. On the first day of same-sex weddings, City Hall in San Francisco was as tranquil and joyful a place as I’ve ever seen.
But it’s being part of a California lesbian family that makes me feel as if history -- and marriage -- have been thrust upon me, like it or not. Everyone has asked, “so, are you getting married now?!” Yes, I think we are, but I can’t help but be startled by the question. Perhaps I should have spent more time preparing for this moment of liberation; instead, I was figuring out how to build a relationship in spite of legal and political obstacles -- and developing a healthy skepticism about marriage as an institution. From Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (p. 302):

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.

(Cross-posted at Legal History Blog)

On July 2

On this day in ...
... 1908 (100 years ago today), Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After earning his J.D. from Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., began practicing as counsel for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; eventually he would join the NAACP's national staff and become its Chief Legal Officer. His achievements included successful pursuit of litigation that led to Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954); service as a federal appellate judge; service as Solicitor General of the United States; and service as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the 1st African-American to hold the latter 2 posts. Marshall died at age 84 in 193. His contributions to the Constitution of Kenya are profiled in Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (above left), the new book by our colleague Mary Dudziak (right).
... 1782, Geneva surrendered to a coalition of French, Sardinian, and Bernese troops, bringing to an end the "Geneva Revolution" that had been inspired by the city's native philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who'd died on the same day 4 years earlier. Works of Rousseau like Du contrat social/The Social Contract (1762) soon would influence revolutions in America and France.

The write women

Monday morning tip:
The weekly go-to site for a roundup of interesting books reviewed in Sunday's papers is Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog. Featured there this past week, 2 new books by women scholars now on our gotta-read list:
► Melissa Nobles (right), The Politics of Official Apologies, a comparative study of the utility, or not, of apologies for state misconduct, in United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Links to review here.
► Samantha Power (left), Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the U.N. diplomat and former High Commissioner for Human Right skilled in the suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq. Links to reviews here.
Also of note:
Last week's Washington Post profile of historian and newly installed Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust (right), an interview prompted by the recent release of her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

Any "cooler heads" in Kenya?

A week ago Kenya's Justice Minister, Martha Karua (right), predicted the political crisis that's roiled her country in the weeks following a disputed Presidential election would settle down. Karua told the BBC she expected that "cooler heads" would prevail: "We expect that eventually everybody will come to their senses, realise that we've got to learn to live with each other."
Sadly, her prediction's proved premature.
Here's the latest news from Nairobi: "Nine people were hacked or burned to death in new violence linked to Kenya's political crisis on Tuesday, as former UN secretary general Kofi Annan arrived to revive mediation efforts."

Since violence erupted in the wake of the December 27, 2007, balloting, more than 700 Kenyans have been killed. Another 250,000 have fled their homes.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga's called it a "constitutional crisis," a contention that our colleague Mary Dudziak, author of a forthcoming book on Thurgood Marshall's role in drafting the Kenya Constitution, has analyzed here.

Odinga and his rival, incumbent President Mwai Kibaki, came together in the same room last week for the 1st time since the election, to vote on who'd become Speaker of Parliament. Though Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement won, the vote was close, and the victory did not stop the turmoil.

Indeed, yesterday an Odinga spokesman said the movement had "sent a formal complaint to the International Criminal Court in The Hague notifying the panel about the charges that authorities committed crimes against humanity during the crackdown on demonstrations" -- a charge the government met by saying it'd be complaining to the ICC that the oppostion was "involved in planning 'mass genocide.'"
Annan, a 2001 Nobel Peace laureate (right), was to have arrived in Nairobi to launch mediation talks a week ago but delayed on account of flu. Now that he's there, he's got his work cut out for him.

As for Dr. King & Judge Marshall ...

... see Mary L. Dudziak's excellent post on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall here.

Self-defeating prophecy

Following on our discussion of the 2008 U.S. elections, check out this Legal History Blog post about the media's narrative du jour: depiction of the Democratic Presidential contest as "Rights vs. Rights," as women against persons of color, binaries on "An Improbable Collision Course."
One hoped to keep this election above the hope-drained us-versus-them mentality that's been all too prevalent lately -- a mentality perhaps best captured in the September 20, 2001, declaration of President George W. Bush to Congress, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
Not the least of our concerns about the media's current narrative ought to be the degree to which, as IntLawGrrl Johanna E. Bond has posted, the narrative renders women of color invisible, ignores the intersection of race, and sex, and class, and all the other myriad attributes that comprise each of our identities.
Our concern also ought to be, as Mary Dudziak writes (quoting Tenured Radical, the blog of Wesleyan University historian Claire B. Potter), that "we've 'hit the limits of identity politics in this election,'" so that it's time to "get 'back to ideas -- rather than inane debates about whose political rights matter most.' Here, here."
How does the current story line defeat us all? Must we count the ways?

On December 12, ...

... 1982 (25 years ago today), 30,000 women from across Britain joined hands in a peace protest outside Greenham Common (left), encircling the military base that lay 45 miles west of London. The event was part of a years-long Women's Peace Camp, described here, outside the base.
... 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain. A New York Times reporter wrote: "With Britain's Union Jack replaced by the black, red and green flag of the new state[,] political power in Britain's last East African colonial holding slipped from the grasp of its 55,759 whites and was taken up by its 8,365,942 Africans." Jomo Kenyatta became the country's 1st Prime Minister. For a window onto this moment in history, check out the paper entitled "Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall and the Constitution of Kenya," by our colleague Mary L. Dudziak, and keep your eyes peeled for her forthcoming book on the same subject.