Read On! Cosmopolitan Justice

(Delighted to welcome alumna Cecilia Marcela Bailliet, who contributes this guest post)

Many thanks to the IntlLawGrrls for the opportunity to announce Routledge's publication this month of Cosmopolitan Justice and its Discontents, the volume that I co-edited with my University of Oslo colleague, Professor of Criminology Katja Franko Aas.
This book:
► Seeks to fill a lacuna with respect to critical and legal perspectives within the field of cosmopolitanism, which has largely been dominated by positive literature within sociology, political science or philosophy.
► Highlights the importance of international economic and investment law and its institutions when assessing the evolution of cosmopolitan norms. Included is a presentation of the Council of Ethics of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, as an empirical example.
► Contains five chapters by women scholars. Utrecht Professor Chrisje Brants addresses dilemmas related to collective guilt and International Criminal Law; Lucerne Senior Researcher Kyriaki Topidi discusses the process of European Union constitutionalization in Turkey and resulting tensions relating to the values tolerance and diversity; Central Lancashire Professor Barbara Hudson and Oslo Professor Katja Franko Aas both explain ironies related to migration and counter-terrorist policies and practices; and yours truly, Cecilia Marcela Bailliet, seeks to explore how a single act of conscientious objection by an individual American soldier revealed a complex network of cosmopolitan federalism.

'Nuff said

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

'To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.'

-- This quote from an item in an 1896 edition of Munsey's Magazine comes to us via Andrew Sullivan's Dish, which in turn links to culture blogger/tweeter Maria Popova's Atlantic review of Sue Macy's new book (right) on women and bipedal empowerment.
Seems likely to this 'Grrl that decades from now some historian will say the same thing about women and electronic communications that Munsey's once said about women and bikes.

Paris in America in Paris, today

A distinguished group will examine Paris in America in Paris this afternoon, at a session this 'Grrl regrets having to miss.
Featured will be 2 IntLawGrrls guests/alumnae -- Professor Mireille Delmas-Marty (below left), holder of the Chair of Comparative Legal Studies and Internationalization of Law at the Collège de France de Paris, where the colloquium will occur, and Pittsburgh Law Professor Vivian Grosswald Curran (below, near right) -- as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (bottom left).
The program will begin at 3:30 p.m. at Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre at the Collège, located at 11, place Marcelin-Berthelot.
Inspiring the session is the English-edition title of an 1863 book by Édouard Laboulaye, Mireille (left) explained in an interview published at page 504 of n the February 17, 2011, edition of Recueil Dalloz. Published under the pseudonym René Lefebvre, Laboulaye's Paris in America went through 35 French and 8 English editions. It is a celebratory study of American constitutionalism -- no coincidence then that, as Mireille noted, Laboulaye, in his day an adminstrator of the Collège de France, "contributed actively, along with the sculptor Bartholdi, to the realization of the Statue of Liberty."
Mireille challenged her interviewer's implication that comparative law might not provide a useful platform for study of contemporary democracies (my translation):

I would not say that comparative law is a 'subaltern' discipline; to the contrary, I believe that it is indispensable in an era in which the interdependence of states has become so strong that the interactions among diverse national and regional systems lie at the heart of the phenomena of the internationalization of law. ... Even constitutional judges, presented with difficult or undecided questions, have a need for comparative law.

Acknowledging that consultation by Breyer and colleagues on the Court had provoked controversy within the United States, Mireille stated:

Paradoxically, this controversy demonstrated that, in this time of globalization, comparative law is on the front lines in democracies.

This afternoon's program thus will begin with a tribute marking the bicentennial of the birth of Laboulaye. It's on that subject that Vivian will speak. Joining her on the panel will be Professor Jean-Louis Halpérin of Ecole normale supérieure; and Professor Bénédicte Fauvarque-Cosson (far right), of Université de Paris II and secretary-general of the Société de législation comparée. Olivier Dutheillet de Lamothe, conseiller d’État and former member of the Conseil constitutionnel, will moderate.
Commenting on the transition from the 19th to the 21st century will be Columbia Law Professor George Bermann, President of the International Academy of Comparative Law.
Finally, a session titled "Le juge constitutionnel et la démocratie" will mark the French publication of Justice Breyer's latest book, titled La Cour suprême, l'Amérique et son histoire in French, and Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View in English. A central theme of the book, as Mireille described it to her Recueil Dalloz interviewer:

Even if he remains optimistic, Breyer recognizes that the support of the public is never guaranteed. The relation between the constitutional judge and democracy is always susceptible to reinvention.

Taking part in a discussion of the book's themes will be Justice Breyer; Mireille; Guy Canivet of the Conseil constitutionnel; and Antoine Garapon, secretary-general of the Institut des hautes études sur la justice. Senator Robert Badinter, formerly President of the Conseil constitutionnel, will moderate.
Admission is free and open to the public.

'Nuff said

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

He played a small but meaningful role in this unique gathering of princes, presidents, and kings-in-waiting, sitting down face-to-face with Emir Faisal ibn Husayn, who would briefly be king of Syria and then of Iraq. Faisal's translator and adviser was none other than T.E. Lawrence, fresh from the exploits in insurgency that earned him the nickname Lawrence of Arabia. Working with Lawrence, Frankfurter negotiated an exchange of letters expressing mutual support for the national hopes of Jews and Arabs alike -- a kind of hopeful entente that prefigured later cooperation between the Zionists and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

-- A story of the bit part that Felix Frankfurter (above left) played in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (prior posts) that led to the Versailles Treaty and many other post-World War I agreements. Recounted at p. 30 of in Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices (2010), by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman. Frankfurter was among those those "greats," according to Feldman. The others (4 out of 9 FDR appointees) were Robert H. Jackson, Hugo Black, and William O. Douglas. In Feldman's telling, the 4 were instrumental in the entrenchment of theories of constitutional interpretation that persist to this day: respectively, judicial restraint, pragmatism, originalism, and legal realism. (credit for circa 1927 photo of Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law professor)

Read On! South Africa constitutionalism

Our colleague Dr. Emanuela Fronza, a law professor at the University of Trento, Italy, recommends a brand-new book, Constitutionalism and Transitional Justice in South Africa (2011), by Dr. Andrea Lollini, Assistant Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law, University of Bologna.

The publisher writes:

Investigating the post-apartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the post-apartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems.

Read On! Once (& future?) Haiti

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing we're reading)

A long-exiled leader's come home and offered to save his country -- if only someone would free up his assets, frozen for the last year.

Suspicious, but not sure why?

Good time for a good read of The Comedians, the 1965 novel in which Graham Greene painted a picture of the Haiti of the time.
It was, as Greene famously wrote, a "Nightmare Republic" (p. 50), in which paramilitary thugs in dark glasses -- nicknamed after evildoers of Haitian folklore, the Tontons Macoutes -- served the ends of a corrupt regime by killing, maiming, terrorizing, anyone, anytime. Among those caught up were Graham's "comedians," 3 of the many outsiders who, in myriad ways, mired themselves in Haiti's woes.

At the head of that nightmare regime?

François Duvalier, known to all as "Papa Doc" (below, far left). Once a respected physician, following his election in 1957 he ruled with an increasingly brutal hand until his death in 1971. Succeeding him was his son Jean-Claude (below, near left), whose 15-year regime likewise was marked by killings, torture, and corruption. (photo credit)

As Hope posted, it is that son, "Baby Doc," now 59, who's returned to Port-au-Prince. And though prosecutors may thwart his goal, it seems he wishes to play a self-styled, and highly suspect, role of Haiti's savior.

Look On, Read On: Can watching & reading stop a renewal of Sudan's other war?

Yesterday marked the launch of the Satellite Sentinel Project, which aims to use technology to provide early warnings and raise public awareness about violence in Africa's largest country (map credit), and so to try "to deter the resumption of war between North and South Sudan."
Satellite Sentinel's a partnership of Hollywood celebrities (George Clooney et al.), corporate America (Google et al.), nongovernmental organizations (the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative), and intergovernmental organizations (agencies of the United Nations). It promises to provide corroborated information

in near real-time (within 24-36 hours), with the aim of heading off humanitarian disaster and human rights crimes before they occur.

A core objective -- to use this information to prod the public to pressure public officials -- is apparent in the Project's slogan: "The world is watching because you are watching."

Can it work?

At the least, it may make more difficult a full-scale return to Sudan's other war -- not Darfur, the western Sudan (green on the map) turmoil that continues to simmer even as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir continues to evade an International Criminal Court warrant, but rather the civil war that ravaged the southerly regions of Sudan for 20 years before the signing of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. The agreement granted the south some autonomy and provided for a future referendum on full independence from the government in Khartoum (in the orange region on the map). Voting is just around the corner: January 9, 2011, in Southern Sudan (blue) and Abyei (red). Backers of Satellite Sentinel hope that the Project's eyes in the sky -- commercial satellites -- and voices on the ground will help to avoid violence during or after the election.

(Unstated is another potential use of these data. Should proactive efforts fall short, surveillance footage and contemporaneous reports would create a trove of evidence for prosecution of perpetators. To name a possible forum, the International Criminal Court is keenly interested these days in election-related violence. (And see here.)

Missing from the Project mix?

In contrast with Darfur, the history of North-South troubles is largely unknown. This absence of background knowledge may make it harder to push the public to push their officials. But there is much background information available.

In addition to any number of weighty tomes, here are a few mass market treatments that provide contexts for what is to come:
► Emma's War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil--A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan (2002) by Deborah Scroggins, formerly a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The title pretty much says it all: this is the biography of Emma McCune, a Briton whose art history studies led her to Southern Sudan, 1st as an aid worker, then as an independence advocate, and ultimately to marriage with a rebel leader and death, in a Nairobi car crash, at age 30. McCune's trajectory sweeps with it much about the war.

► Acts of Faith (2005) by Philip Caputo, a onetime Chicago Tribune reporter and Pulitzer Prizewinner. Readers of Emma's War will find in this novel a familiar charater -- a lost young woman, American rather than British, who arrives in Sudan as an aid worker and eventually marries a rebel warlord. She's easier to understand than McCune, perhaps because the fictional format allowed the author more free rein. Acts benefits too from other characters and other subplots, all woven around a large and complex story of Western involvement (charitable and otherwise) in the civil war and the warriors' practice of enslaving captives.
► What Is the What (2006) by Dave Eggers. In this book Eggers, the subject of a prior post, writes the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, born in the midst of the civil war. Deng's tragic journeys include a short stint as a child soldier and a much longer one as a "Lost Boy," wandering with other unfortunates in a wilderness that leads 1st to a refugee camp in Kenya and ultimately to a new and strange life in the United States. This is the best written of the 3 books, but the reader will better understand it if informed as well by the other 2.

Read On! ICL Handbook

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Nadia Bernaz, who contributes this Read On! guest post)

It is a pleasure to come back on IntLawGrrls (my previous posts are here and here) to announce the Routledge Handbook of International Criminal Law, published last month.
I co-edited the Handbook with Professor William A. Schabas, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway. We wanted to put together a book that would provide a reader new to the area with an introduction to this fast-growing area of law. But, at the same time, we did not want to edit a mere textbook. The whole idea was to give our contributors (who include a number of IntLawGrrls besides myself: Fiona de Londras, Leila Nadya Sadat, Margaret deGuzman, and Nancy Amoury Combs) the freedom to express their opinions, as scholars, on the areas they were asked to write on.
We are really happy with the results as our contributors have manage to deliver concise, original and provocative papers which, combined together in one single publication, make this book greatly relevant to students, scholars and practitioners working in the field.
Here is the table of contents:

1. Introduction, William Schabas and Nadia Bernaz

Part 1: Historical and Institutional Framework
2. Trial at Nuremberg, Guénaël Mettraux
3. The Tokyo Trial, Neil Boister
4. The Trials of Eichmann, Barbie and Finta, Joseph Powderly
5. The Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunals: Launching a New Era of Accountability, Michael P. Scharf and Margaux Day
6. The International Criminal Court, David Scheffer
7. Hybrid Tribunals, Fidelma Donlon

Part 2: The Crimes
8. Genocide, Paola Gaeta
9. Crimes Against Humanity, Margaret M. deGuzman
10. War Crimes, Anthony Cullen
11. Aggression, Nicolaos Strapatsas
12. Terrorism as an International Crime, Fiona De Londras
13. Drug Crimes and Money Laundering, Robert Cryer

Part 3: The Practice of International Tribunals
14. Understanding the Complexities of International Criminal Tribunal Jurisdiction, Leila Sadat
15. Admissibility in International Criminal Law, Mohamed M. El Zeidy
16. Defences to International Crimes, Shane Darcy
17. Participation in Crimes in the Jurisprudence of the ICTY and ICTR, Mohamed Elewa Badar
18. International Criminal Procedures: Trial and Appeal Procedures, Hakan Friman
19. Sentencing and Penalties, Nadia Bernaz
20. State Cooperation and Transfers, Judge Kimberley Prost
21. Evidence, Nancy Combs

Part 4: Key Issues in International Criminal Law
22. The Rise and Fall of Universal Jurisdiction, Luc Reydams
23. Immunities, Rémy Prouvèze
24. Truth Commissions, Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm
25. State Responsibility and International Crimes, Eric Wyler and León Castellanos-Jankiewicz
26. International Criminal Law and Victims’ Rights, Carla Ferstman
27. Amnesties, Louise Mallinder
28. International Criminal Law and Human Rights, Thomas Margueritte
29. Conclusion, William Schabas and Nadia Bernaz

Climate Change: A View from South Carolina

I just spent the last couple of days participating in a very interesting conference at the University of South Carolina organized by Prof. Cinnamon Carlarne (pictured left), who also has recently published a thoughtful book with Oxford University Press that compares U.S. and European climate change law. She brought together a geographically diverse group which included people from multiple disciplines in academia and from practice to analyze how to make progress on climate change in the current climate. The conference was organized by legal scale (international, national, regional), but each panel was also designed to analyze the issues at its level of governance in interaction with other levels. The conversation additionally included very interesting informal break-out sessions that brought together the speakers and participants to discuss cross-cutting issues of interest.
The conference modeled the kind of dialogue that is needed to move things forward on climate change. It grappled with the deeply intersectional nature of the problem and law’s interaction with it. And to have this dialogue in South Carolina--a state that faces complex issues around both mitigation and adaption in a region that grapples with both at-risk coastlines and strong anti-regulatory sentiments—was particularly compelling. Congratulations Cinnamon!

Read On! Zeitoun

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing we're reading)

Feel a bit late to the table commenting on Zeitoun, the 2009 book by Dave Eggers. Blurbs on and in the paperback edition indicate that a host of reviews named it a best book of last year. Yet it's new to me, and worth a word or 2.

In Zeitoun Eggers writes at the overlap of fiction and nonfiction, novelizing the "true story" of persons whom he's interviewed extensively. It's a technique he also employed in What Is the What (2007), an epic biographical novel/autobiography of a man who'd been a Lost Boy during the war in Southern Sudan. Zeitoun is slimmer and makes no claim to autobiography; in this author's humble opinion, the newer book works less well, and perhaps that is one reason why.

(Eggers deserves much credit for his Voice of Witness efforts to publish stories of victims of human rights violations, and for his establishment of charities, like The Zeitoun Foundation, to continue his books' good works.)

The new book's principal characters are the Zeitouns, a Syrian-born husband of Arab heritage and his Louisiana-born wife of European heritage. Their home is New Orleans. Both are Muslims --he by birth, she by conversion shortly before meeting him -- and both suffered during and after Hurricana Katrina.

Eggers tries to present the story through the eyes of this couple, but the narrational voice remains his own. Thus at times certain passages, like that which attributes to the wife a reference to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as "not-so-distantly related branches of the same monotheistic Abrahamic faith" (p. 66), lack an authentic ring.

Perhaps it's because of the Eggers' apparent outrage at how the couple were treated. That outrage is entirely appropriate, but his desire to explain the couple and their family, to contextualize their experience, occasionally gets in the way of their story. To name another example: even if it had been made far less overtly, caring contemporary readers would get the Guantánamo comparison that underlay the husband's travails and his wife's traumatic response to them.

That said, any caring reader will profit from pondering the story of the Zeitouns. It is, as Eggers recognizes, inevitably a story of contemporary policy and practice regarding human and national security.

Read On! International Law/Human Trafficking

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Anne Gallagher, who contributes this Read On! guest post)

My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to write about my book The International Law of Human Trafficking, published this month by Cambridge University Press.

This book has evolved out of more than a decade of writing and practice. It reflects experiences and insights from my working life as a UN official, as a teacher and scholar of international law, and as a practitioner in the field. It builds on my research of the past few years, which has included:

► A first-hand identification of the essential elements of an effective criminal justice response to trafficking, set forth in a 2008 article co-authored with Paul Holmes;

► A detailed legal commentary to the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking that will be released by the United Nations shortly;

► A 2009 feature article, published in the Virginia Journal of International Law, which refutes James Hathaway’s critique of the international legal response to trafficking;

► A study, with IntLawGrrls' guest/alumna Elaine Pearson, of the legal and policy implications of shelter detention for victims of trafficking, published this year in Human Rights Quarterly and also the subject of a previous IntLawGrrls post; and

► A critical analysis of the first decade of the annual U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Reports, to be published in Human Rights Review in early 2011.

As I write in the introduction to my new book, The International Law of Human Trafficking is not a specialist treatise in the usual sense. More accurately, it represents an attempt to apply the science and tools of international law to a specific, contemporary issue. From this perspective it is as much about sources of international legal obligation, the formation of international law, the doctrines of responsibility, and theories of compliance, as it is about trafficking.

The book’s focus is essentially a problem-solving one: the international community has identified trafficking as a problem, and has decided that law will be used to structure and enable at least part of the solution to that problem. By providing a clear and organized explanation of the law as it is, the capacity of those who are in a position to use international law to hold states and others to account is hopefully strengthened.

Documented is what former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson (left), in her review of my book, has called

the extraordinary developments of the past decade

that is, changes in laws, policies and practices that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.

The book concludes that these advances, while remarkable when viewed in historical perspective, are nevertheless fundamentally constrained in terms of both vision and effect. States are able to record relatively high and improving levels of conformity with international legal rules related to trafficking in large part because those rules, in the end, do not demand a great deal. The rules request, but do not compel, states to take positive action to address the root causes of trafficking, not least what the “thoroughly modern anarchist” Emma Goldman more than a century ago called

the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labour.

The rules acknowledge the link between trafficking and the massive labor migration that greases the wheels of the global economy, without requiring States to provide individuals with safe and legal avenues through which to move. They affirm the principle of nondiscrimination, without insisting that the rules, attitudes and practices that render women, children and migrants most vulnerable to trafficking-related exploitation be immediately and comprehensively dismantled.

It is currently possible for a state to find itself within the letter, if not the spirit of its international legal obligations merely by criminalizing trafficking, diligently investigating cases that come to its attention, cooperating with other States when requested, and taking at least some measures to support and protect identified victims. While my book has hopefully succeeded in fleshing out these basic obligations, it acknowledges that the obligations do not, even in expanded form, amount to terribly much. Like a commitment to halt anthropogenic climate change by imposing emission reductions that have, in truth, no hope of meeting that goal, there is a fatal gap between what is legally required of states and what is actually needed to reach the stated objective.

A genuine commitment to ending trafficking and related private exploitation requires us to both acknowledge and challenge the limitations of the contemporary international legal imagination.

Kudos to Jaya

Proud to report that Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform (2009), coauthored by IntLawGrrls' own Jaya Ramji-Nogales (left), is the subject of the lead book review in the latest edition of the prestigious British journal, The Modern Law Review.
Reviewer Mike Sanderson (right), Kosovo-based Legal Consultant to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, sets out a superb account of the empirical research by Jaya and her coauthors, Andrew I. Schoenholtz and Philip G. Schrag. Sanderson's evaluation of the book, on which we've posted here, is nothing short of gushing. In the fashion of movie advertisements, here're a few snippets:

... I cannot recall another occasion where an academic work has been so widely trailed, at least in my own area of refugee and asylum law. There is good reason for this. ...
...
... truly eye-popping ...
... exciting ...
... Ramji-Nogales, Schoenholtz and Schrag seem to be stones that have rubbed each other smooth. Their prose is beautifully clear throughout. ...
... it is excellent value and deserves to be widely purchased and read. ...

Agreed!

Read On! The Vagrants

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing we're reading)

To tell the same story from different viewpoints is not new. The technique won renown in the film Rashômon (1950), and has remained a staple of storytelling ever since.
Yet the way that Yiyun Li (below right) deploys multiple narratives in The Vagrants (2009) is indeed something new.
This novel is the 1st by Li, who was born in Beijing, lived in China till 1996, and who's now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
Li's novel revolves around a single event yet reveals a myriad of details about a time, a place, and a people.
The event is the execution of Gu Shan, an enemy of the state who years before had given her all to the Maoist vanguard. The time is 1979, the year Li turned 7; desires for democracy are stirring a decade after the Cultural Revolution. The place is Muddy River, a soulless, purpose-built factory city in a Chinese province far from the capital. The people are those who've come to inhabit this city -- vagrants all regardless of their station.
From among these vagrants, Li chooses her narrators. It is a rich assortment, richly characterized. Tiny Tong's tale of bewilderment is told alongside that of Kai, a broadcaster and mother who's married into the seeming safety of a leading political family, yet chafes at her role. Adolescent Nini's resentment at her very different restraints leads her to the loathsome arms of the amoral Bashi. The old Huas collect rubbish, and discarded daughters.
Li addresses an array of issues in The Vagrants: disability, poverty, criminal justice and capital punishment, education, familial hierarchy and filial duty. But she does so without polemic, through wonderfully written, intimate portraits of her characters. Each narrator's small story remains in mind even as the reader ponders Li's larger narrative of an empty and arbitrary society, in a state at odds with its people.
A literary jewel.

Read On! 1939

What turns an expatriate neighbor to an enemy alien?
That's the question underlying 1939, a novel published in 1948.
The story centers on a proud Parisian, Madame Corinne Audal. Years ago she'd married protection, in the form of a French military officer. But she's fled the city to live atop a mountain with her lover, Ferdl Eder, an alpine man from Austria. Initially the Savoyard villagers tolerate the couple. But then war arrives. Ferdl's homeland has fallen under Nazi rule. France soon will fall. Her protection ebbs, and his bid to join the Allies goes terribly awry.
The author is Minnesota-born Kay Boyle (1902-1992). Herself an expat in France throughout the '20s and '30s, the oft-married Boyle (left) wrote often about Europe and the Nazis. Back in the United States during the postwar McCarthy era, she continued her political activism and found herself blacklisted by many magazines, even as her (3d) husband, an Austrian baron, was dismissed from a State Department post.
This is not among Boyle's best-known works. But it's wonderfully written. A sample passage:

So now you'll get out of here where you don't belong, Madame Audal; you'll take your thirty years and your painted mouth and your shameless eye back to where they came from; you, French, or just pretending to be French, but just as much a foreigner as he was because you took up with a foreigner like him; ...

1939's 152 pages provoke considerable thought about national, regional, and ethnic identity, about allegiances, about suspicion and security -- issues as compelling today as they were then.

Spring reading, of sorts

It is Spring, when a law prof's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of...
... you know ...
... which casebook she'll assign next semester.*

That thought in mind, we note 2 promising new intlaw texts:
► The 1st is The International Legal System: Cases and Materials (6th ed. 2010) (below, far right).
Initially published in 1973, this Foundation Press standard has a whole new authors' lineup: Naomi Roht-Arriaza (California-Hastings) and Mary Ellen O'Connell (Notre Dame), IntLawGrrl and IntLawGrrl guest/alumna, respectively, along with Richard F. Scott (Thomas Jefferson). The table of contents promises an organized and varied survey of public international law, in general and in specific areas like the environment and the economy, human rights and the use of force. This 'Grrl, who's teaching intlaw in the fall, plans to give it a try.
► The 2d is International and Transnational Criminal Law (2009) (near right).
This 1st edition Aspen publication is the work of 3 of our colleagues, all affiliated with Georgetown Law: Julie R. O'Sullivan, David Luban, and David P. Stewart. It joins others in the ICL field, including the casebook, now in its 2d ed., co-authored by IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack.
Check 'em out.

* Apologies to Tennyson. Only Jackson Browne would've said love. (credit for 1922 portrait, La Liseuse, by Félix Valloton)

IntLawGrrl reviewed

IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn's brand-new Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (2010), co-authored with Missouri-Kansas City Law Professor June Carbone, received extended treatment in yesterday's New York Times column by Ross Douthat.
Imitating movie ads, here're some of the adjectives Douthat used to describe the book:
► "provocative"
► "nuanced"
Kudos!

Read On! Gender Stereotyping

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading) A quick plug for a great new book on gender stereotyping and human rights law: Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives by Rebecca Cook and Simone Cusack.
It cannot be gainsaid that women have been, and remain, subordinated to men in nearly every nation-state, organized religion, legal system, and cultural tradition around the globe. With startling transnational consistency, women are the subject of persistent and pervasive stereotypes that

• devalue us,
• impede our full equality with men, and
• hamper our ability to make autonomous life choices.

Such stereotypes, while deeply engrained, are often invisible and unconscious in the way in which they socially construct what it means to be male and female in society and co-opt women in our own subordination. While many manifestations of overt discrimination against women—such as laws preventing women from owning property or engaging in certain professions—have been successfully challenged and dismantled through the invocation of international human rights norms and constitutional principles of equal protection, stereotypes at times seem impervious to law.
Not so, say Rebecca Cook and Simone Cusack in their impressive new book Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) (right). Drawing on exhaustive comparative research, Cook and Cusack argue that the law—and in particular transnational human rights law—has the potential to expose and deconstruct stereotypes that justify and perpetuate women’s subordination. The authors’ primary tool in this endeavor is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the multilateral treaty in the human rights pantheon devoted to women’s rights. As its title suggests, CEDAW operates from an equality paradigm, seeking

the elimination of measures that have the effect or purpose of impairing the exercise by women of human rights and freedoms on the basis of equality with men.

More radically, Article 5(a) of CEDAW further obliges states to

modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, an expert body charged with enforcing the Convention, has made clear in its 19th General Recommendation that states must

• not only protect women against discrimination in the public and private spheres, but they must also
• improve the de facto position of women and
• address prevailing gender relations and the persistence of sex- and gender-based stereotypes.

Cook and Cusack rightfully recognize the as-yet unmet potential for Article 5(a) to transcend CEDAW’s equality paradigm and provide an expansive framework for achieving substantive equality and a real and durable transformation in women’s daily lives.
Starting with a useful primer of social science research on the organizing role that stereotypes play in human cognition and drawing on rich case studies, the book presents examples of how governmental laws, institutions, policies, and practices can apply, enforce, and perpetuate pernicious stereotypes that harm women by denying women benefits, imposing burdens on women, or degrading women. As a prescriptive contribution, the book offers a series of practical measures to be employed by all branches of government to better carry out state obligations under CEDAW to eliminate stereotypes in the public and private spheres. In addition, the authors urge the Women’s Committee to pay greater attention to the role that stereotypes play in the forms of discrimination it confronts and to broaden its remedial agenda to demand more from states in the form of structural changes to root out gendered stereotypes. The book closes with a blueprint for what a CEDAW General Recommendation devoted to stereotypes might look like.
This is a great achievement for the authors. Cook (right) is Professor of Law and Faculty Chair in International Human Rights, Faculty of Law, at the University of Toronto. She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of many books, including Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives.
Cusack is a public interest lawyer at the Public Interest Law Clearing House in Melbourne, Australia.

Read On! Half the Sky: Half the Story?

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading) I recently spent two gripping days reading Nicholas D. Kristof's and Sheryl WuDunn's riveting book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (2009). Named for a Chinese proverb that states that women hold up half the sky, the book addresses many of the multiplicity of challenges and mechanisms of violence confronting women throughout the world, including gendercide, human trafficking, rape, female genital surgery, obstetric fistulas and maternal mortality.
In each case, Kristof and WuDunn describe challenges and atrocities, and offer the stories of women (and some men) whose extraordinary characters and/or a confluence of (relatively) beneficial circumstances, allow them to triumph over circumstances that are ordinarily both soul-killing and literally murderous. Mukhtar Mai survived ritual public gang rape and humiliation to found a welfare organization and series of extraordinary schools for girls in Pakistan. Usha Narayane lead the Dalit people of Kasturba Nagar in overthrowing the rule of violent thugs and official indifference to their plight. Edna Adan has created a hospital in Somaliland spearheads an extraordinary fight against maternal mortality in the Horn of Africa. Placed in circumstances that would try any wo(man)'s soul, these individual rise to inspiring heights to help turn the tide of oppression in their neighborhoods and countries.

The authors also tell the stories of Westerners (mostly Americans) who have been inspired to attack these challenges in the developing world. Among others, they tell the stories of Dr. Allan Rosenfield's decades-long campaign for maternal health throughout the world; Jordana Confino's spearheading of Girls Learn International, that partners classes in the United States with others in the developing world; and the students, teachers, and administrators of the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington, which has built and maintained a school in Pailin, Cambodia.

Each of these individual stories is inspiring, and the stated aim of the authors is to inspire us, their readers, to take similar action to combat the challenges facing women worldwide. Indeed, the book provides easy tips for action, and a terrific new website has been launched as an entry point to welcome and educate new participants and activists.

I encourage you to read this book, but with the caveat that those seeking deeper understanding must commit to additional reading in order to build a more complex understanding of the issues addressed. That is, in my reading, although gripped by the stories, I felt that a big part of the story was also missing: where was the structural explanation for the condition of women worldwide? For example, with respect to human trafficking, the authors claim that sex slavery has worsened in recent decades due to: (1) the collapse of Communism, (2) globalization, and (3) AIDS. (pp. 11-12) What is "globalization?" And if one understands "globalization," can one truly state that "this is not a case where we in the West have a responsibility because we're the source of the problem." (pp. 24-25) (See my discussion below.)

The authors also choose to compare oppressions. They state:

'Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln.'

(p. 12) I am not sure of the purpose of the comparison: can multigenerational and hopelessly backbreaking enslavement be "better" in any way than sex slavery? And is it truly necessary to compare modern trafficking in humans to the trans-Atlantic slave trade? Does the comparison, as presented here (pp. 10-11), serve to confer a structural understanding of the similarities and differences in these two forms of exploitation? I was also disappointed that the description of the tactic of rape in the Congo did not include a discussion of the role of minerals, such as coltan, as a key stimulus in the ongoing conflict. What are the incentives, other than sheer cussedness and evil, for the continued conflict?

At risk of perceived self-promotion efforts, for readers wishing to explore such structural understanding of human trafficking, I recommend my three articles on the subject: Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 25 B.U. Int'l L. J. 207 (2007); Free Labor! Toward a Labor Liberalization Solution for Modern Trafficking in Humans, 18 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 545 (2009); and Follow the Money?: Does the International Fight Against Money Laundering Provide a Model for International Anti-Human Trafficking in Efforts?, 6 U. St. Thomas L. J. 138 (2008).

A deeper structural understanding will point to a more uncomfortable reality: we of the West may be complicit, even in our ignorance, where the trade, economic and other policies imposed by our governments lead to circumstances that facilitate the exploitation of women. It is not enough to gain a micro understanding of the issues. We must gain a macro understanding and plan for influencing policies on the macro level.

Read On! Unlikely Allies

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading)

Is she or isn't he?

That conundrum's central to a new diplomatic history of Franco-American relations during the late 18th century revolution by which erstwhile colonists drove Britain out and established the United States of America. As told by our colleague Joel Richard Paul (below left), the tale is rich, and not just for its rich insights into how states form, and how they conform (or not) to international law. The title, Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution (2009), promises much -- and Joel, who's Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Graduate Programs at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, delivers on that promise.

► The spy is the s/he of the story: Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Eon, a Captain of the Dragoons who helped King Louis XVI keep confidential some of her/his father's embarrassing state secrets. Successful completion of that task led, by twists and turns, to d'Eon's secret dealings with others -- dealings that laid groundwork by which the French eventually provided the American rebellion money, arms, and troops that were essential to its ultimate success. Without spoiling the ending, suffice it to say that the story of this spy -- known at various times and places as the Chevalier or the Chevalière, d'Eon -- is a rollicking yarn.

Equally captivating are the book's portraits of 2 others whose derring-do set the stage for a diplomatic coup typically attributed to Benjamin Franklin. (Taking implicit issue with articles like the one here, Joel demonstrates that Franklin did not arrive in Paris until after much of the hard work had been done.) The 2 are:

► Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant sent to Paris even before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Deane was instructed to use trade as cover for his true task of persuading France to aid the Americans.

► Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the writer of Le Barbier de Seville and other comédies, who, with the covert OK of official France, provided munitions to the rebels.

These character studies not only enrich understanding of the times, but also serve as an important reminder that happenstance and idiosyncrasy often affect the course of history.

Also significant are the many passages in Unlikely Allies that provoke thought on issues still current in international affairs. For example:

► The long reluctance of the French sovereign to aid independence abroad, lest the rebel spirit be roused at home (as, indeed, it soon was, in a Revolution that cost Louis XVI his head);

► The duplicity and intrigue that underlie much of the information that's branded "intelligence";

► The consequences of a terrorist attack committed upon the initiative of an anti-British pyromaniac; and

► The French Foreign Minister's refusal of an invitation to join Spain in attacking Portugal, about which Joel writes:

A preemptive war would 'soil oneself with a notorious injustice, which would be invincibly repugnant to the feelings and principles of the two monarchs.' ... The argument for preemptive war was as tempting as it was dangerous. A wise leader would never commit his country to a foreign war in the name of preemption when no imminent threat existed.

(pp. 113-14) The passage resounds with echoes of post-9/11 debates about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a fact that underscores the contemporary significance of this superb historical account.

Read On! Bubbly biography

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading)

Today's Valentine's Day.* 'Round the world thoughts turn to celebration of love and friendship. No doubt some will feature "a bottle of the Widow," as the British used to call the bubbly treat to the right. No better time, then, to post on the recent biography of the woman behind the bottle. The title says it all: The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (2009).

In a scant 200 pages, the book illuminates a central fact: the signature on each bottle's egg-yolk-orange label, "V Clicquot Ponsardin," is not the autograph of a fictitious woman conjured, like Betty Crocker, by an office-full of admen. Rather, the signature belongs to a real woman who lived a full and real life, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin (below left).

Born in 1777 in Reims, a city in France's Champagne region, Barbe-Nicole lived in a period marked by the political tumult of Revolution, Empire, Restoration, Republic. Marriage arranged at 21 ended when Barbe-Nicole was widowed at age 27, her husband rumored a suicide. Single mother of a young daughter, she eschewed remarriage for a path far less tread by women of the day: she made champagne, 1st for elite imperial palates, and eventually, through her manufacturing and marketing innovations, for a vast and thirsty middle class. In painstaking research of records maddeningly devoid of personal details, author Tilar J. Mazzeo (below right), Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, could find no evidence that Barbe-Nicole ever left France. Yet energy and hard work -- plus a keen competitive edge that finds her running contraband wine through wartime blockades -- made Barbe-Nicole, by age 40,

one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs in all of Europe and one of the first businesswomen in history to lead an international commercial empire.

(p. xvii) It was a role unique for the time (approached perhaps only by Louise Pommery, a somewhat younger Frenchwoman who invented the brut style of champagne). Curiously, it's a role away from which Barbe-Nicole steered her own surviving heirs, a daughter and granddaughter. Thus it would take generations before women of business looked to la Veuve for inspiration. Yet before her death at age 89 she urged her granddaughter to excel in other pursuits, as is evident from this letter (p. 181):

'The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous...!!'

To those words and the woman who wrote them, a Valentine's Day toast.

* It's also the 1st day of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger (prior post), but that's another story.