Go On! IntLawGrrls at AALS

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

The Association of American Law Schools will be holding its 2011 annual meeting in San Francisco from January 5-8th. This year's theme is: Core Educational Values: Guideposts for the Pursuit of Excellence in Challenging Times.

If you are attending, be sure to check out IntLawGrrls and IntLawGrrl guests/alumnae in action. As detailed in the annual meeting program, they are:

Wednesday, Jan 5th

► At 2:00 pm, Afra Afsharipour will be speaking at the Law and South Asian Studies Section's panel: Lawyers as Social Change Agents in South Asia.

► Also at 2:00, Michele Bratcher Goodwin will speak on the Biolaw Section's panel: Synthetic Biology Meets the Law, and Penelope Andrews will moderate the Africa Section's panel: U.S. Africa Policy at the Midpoint of President Obama's First Term.

Thursday, Jan. 6th

► At 9:00 am, Stephanie Farrior, Hari M. Osofsky, Christiana Ochoa, Annecoos Wiersema, Leila Nadya Sadat, and Cindy Galway Buys will be participating in the International Law Section's panel: International Law Year in Review.

► At 2:00, Penelope Andrews will be speaking on the Constitutional Law Section's panel: American Constitutionalism in Comparative Perspective.

► At 2:30 pm, Lisa R. Pruitt will take part in a panel on Class, Socio-Economics, and Critical Analysis.

Friday, Jan. 7th

► At 8:30 am, Caroline Bettinger-López and Alexandra Huneeus will present at the
New Voices in Human Rights panel of the Section on International Human Rights.

► At 10:30 am, yours truly, Rebecca M. Bratspies, and Hari M. Osofsky will be participating in the Hot Topics panel: The BP Blowout Oil Spill and Its Implications.

► Also at 10:30, Laurel S. Terry will be speaking on the Education Law Section's panel: Immigration and Higher Education.

► At 4:00, Michelle Oberman will be speaking on the Law, Medicine and Health Care Section's panel: Women's Choices, Women's Voices: Legal Regimes and Women's Health.

Saturday, Jan. 8th is an action-packed IntLawGrrls day:

► At 7:00 in the morning, Laurel S. Terry will be speaking at the AALS Workshop and Continental Breakfast for 2010 and 2011 Section Officers.

► At 8:30 am, yours truly, Rebecca M. Bratspies, will be speaking on the Animal Law Section's panel: Treatment and Impact of Farmed Animals.

► At 1:30 pm, Elizabeth L. Hillman will be speaking on the National Security Section's panel: The Relationship Between Military Justice, Civil/Military Relations and National Security Law.

► Also at 1:30 pm, Jenia Iontcheva Turner will be speaking on the Comparative Law Section's panel: Beyond the State: Comparative Approaches to Group Political Identity in the Age of the Transnational.

► At 3:30 pm, Christiana Ochoa, will be moderating the International Law Section's panel: Was Medellin Wrongly Decided?

► Also at 3:30 pm, Jennifer Kreder will speaker on the Section on Law and Anthropology panel entitled The Role of Cultural Property Across Cultures and Legal Regimes.

As always, I am struck by the wide range of interests that our fearless leader Diane Marie Amann has brought together under the IntLawGrrls umbrella.

FYI: Because the Hilton is embroiled in a labor dispute with UNITE HERE, Local 2 (the hotel's workers have been working without a contract for over a year), registration and most of the AALS events have been moved to other nearby hotels. There may be other last-minute changes, so be sure to go by the locations in the schedule you receive at check-in rather than the brochure that circulated last month. See you in San Francisco.

(credit for 2010 poster of San Francisco by Kevin Dart)

Guest Bloggers: Michele Bratcher Goodwin & Patricia Y. Jones

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Michele Bratcher Goodwin (right) and Dr. Patricia Y. Jones (left) as guest bloggers. Beginning today, they contribute an interdisciplinary conversation (here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on intercountry adoptions.
► Michele, the Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota, holds joint appointments at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her courses include Biotechnology Law, Genetic Property and the Law, Health Law Policy, Health Law Regulations, Law and Education, Legal Ethics, Mental Health Law, and Torts. She is a leading voice in the debates on socioeconomics and race in medicine, having founded the country's 1st center for studying race and bioethics.
Michele's served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and was honored with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Griffith University in Australia. Prior to law teaching Michele -- who earned her J.D. degree at Boston College Law school and holds B.A. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Wisconsin -- was a Gilder-Lehrman postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.
Notable among Michele's many publications is her scholarship on organ transplant policy. Urging a broader reconciliation of the legal treatments of women with differing social statuses, she's helped redefine evaluation of reproductive technology policy. In addition to the forthcoming book Biotechnology and Bioethics, she's the author of Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Human Body Parts (2006), published in Portuguese translation in 2008. The new collection she edited, Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010) (right), contains essays by Michele and others, among them IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn, guest/alumna Michelle Olbermann, and my California-Davis colleague Lisa C. Ikemoto. Michele also co-edited Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body (2009).
Among her many professional achievements, Michele is the former Secretary General of the International Academy of Law & Mental Health and Past Chair of the Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care of the American Association of Law Schools. She's received the Black Pearl Award and the Chicago History Museum’s Pioneering Women Award, and been commissioned a Kentucky Colonel.
► Patricia, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Chicago, has over twenty five years of experience as a clinician and administrator of mental health programs. She's a member of the Steering Committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
Her vocational experience encompasses an array of clinical settings: public and private, profit and not-for-profit, and academic institutions. Consistent is her focus on access to and development of appropriate mental health care for children and their families. She has specific interests in applied psychological practice with culturally diverse populations, in interpersonal violence with concomitant post-traumatic stress disorders, and in child abuse. Patricia provides consultation and/or clinical supervision to administrative and program staff who serve a diverse population within a wide variety of social service organizations; especially, to Child Protective Services across the United States.

Patricia earned her B.S. degree in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Michelle Oberman

It is a distinct pleasure to introduce my friend and Santa Clara Law colleague Michelle Oberman (left) as a guest blogger.
Michelle has a background in public health, and her research focuses on legal and ethical issues relating to adolescence, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. In recent years, she has written about statutory rape, postpartum mental health issues and the law, filicide, substance abuse by pregnant women, and the fiduciary obligations of health care providers to their patients. In addition to teaching in the area of Health Law, Michelle teaches Criminal Law and Contracts.
In 2008 she co-authored When Mothers Kill: Interviews From Prison, depicted below right, with Dr. Cheryl L. Meyer, Professor of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Their work won the Outstanding Book Award that year from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. According to the ACJS,

The book was excellent and captured both the concrete circumstances and the complex morality of the women…

In her guest post below, Michelle recounts some of what she and I learned on our recent research trip to Costa Rica in connection with Santa Clara's summer program at the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Heartfelt welcome!

Rosita's Legacy

(Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post.)

As my colleague, IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack, and I recently made the rounds of various women’s groups during our research trip to Costa Rica, attempting to get a sense of whether and how the world of international human rights might be employed to help to mobilize those working on behalf of women’s status in Central America, everyone spoke of “la Rosita.” They did so as if her case had happened only yesterday. In fact, it had been six years since the then-nine-year-old girl was found to be pregnant and was refused an abortion by the Costa Rican government’s health service on the grounds that the pregnancy did not threaten her life.

Rosita’s story is layered, and has unfolded over the interceding years in ways that are at once horrific and mundane.

In Costa Rica, doctors, lawyers and health advocates invoke it to illustrate any number of problems plaguing women’s autonomy in their region of the world. (One of her drawings, entitled "Rosita sad," is at left.) Rosita’s mother brought her daughter to the doctor when the girl began complaining of stomach pain. It took several days before they realized she was just over three months pregnant. When she was transferred to San José for care, doctors put her in the obstetrical ward of the women’s hospital rather than in the children’s hospital.

Somehow, the media learned of Rosita’s pregnancy, which allegedly resulted from her having been raped by an acquaintance. Costa Rican law permits therapeutic abortions when the pregnancy poses a danger to a woman’s life or physical health. Perhaps the publicity around her case shaped her doctors’ decision that Rosita did not qualify for such an exception to the general ban on abortion.

With the help of local activists, the family returned to their home state, Nicaragua, where three doctors verified, in accordance with the law at that time, that the pregnancy was in fact life-threatening. Rosita obtained an abortion, but by then, her case had become a cause célèbre around the world. Filmmakers made an award-winning documentary (trailer) telling of her plight. Narrated in part by Rosita's mother and stepfather (right), the film expresses the hope that the abortion had been a way to permit her to resume her childhood.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion advocates vowed to tighten the laws that had permitted her to obtain a legal abortion. Daniel Ortega was elected president of Nicaragua on a platform supporting a complete ban on abortion. In 2006, Nicaragua became one of 4 countries in the world to ban abortion under all circumstances, including when pregnancy poses a threat to the life of the mother.

In late 2005, Rosita, still a child, became pregnant again. This time she carried her baby to term, and DNA testing determined that Rosita had been impregnated by her stepfather. It is now widely accepted that he caused her earlier pregnancy as well. In November 2007, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Today, Rosita and her baby live in state custody.

The women with whom Beth and I spoke in Costa Rica were on the front line of the struggle to improve women’s lives in their country and in their region of the world. Each spoke of Rosita’s case, and yet her story only emerged in bits and pieces:

► One group was most interested in the ensuing prosecution of the nine women who had assisted Rosita’s escape and helped her get her legal abortion.

► Others focused on the way the case has been used by anti-abortion activists to slander women’s health advocates in Nicaragua and throughout the region.

► Another recounted the manner in which Rosita’s mother’s initial ambivalence about abortion, coupled with the media attention the case received, left the doctors with no real alternative but to deny the abortion.

No one spoke about the manner in which Rosa initially became pregnant. No one talked about the fact that she became a mother two years later, while still a child. No one mentioned that the law had not managed to protect Rosa from her abuser.
Instead, we spoke of the grey space beneath the law in which girls and women presently struggle to find a safe path to walk through their lives. It became clear that the law is only part of what circumscribes women’s status in their country, as in our own. To speak of rights was to tell only a half-truth. And yet, to ignore rights language altogether was to invite in the resignation that accompanies oppression. It was to feel shamed and humiliated, rather than simply afraid.