'Nuff said

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

'How many women would be enough?' Sawyer asked.
'Nine,' Ginsburg replied with a smile. 'There've been nine men there for a long time, right? So why not nine women?'

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (center) (prior IntLawGrrls posts), in conversation with ABC TV News' Diane Sawyer (left). (Hat tip to Professor Sally Kenney, Executive Director, Newcomb College Institute and Newcomb College Endowed Chair, Tulane University, via IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin) The conversation, video of which is available here, took place last October during a California conference on women. Also on the dais was the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor (above, right), who retired in 2005 from her post as the 1st woman Justice. Today, of course, there are 3 -- in addition to Ginsburg, newcomer Justices Sonia Sotomayor (prior posts) and Elena Kagan (prior posts). Of this development, O'Connor said:

'I've got to tell you, I went to the Supreme Court recently... I sat in on an argument, and I looked up at the bench on which I sat for 25 years, and what did I see? I saw on the far right, a woman. On the far left side, a woman. And here in the middle, a woman. And it was dazzling.'

On January 31

On this day in ...
... 2006 (5 years ago today), Sandra Day O'Connor completed her last day as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, nearly a quarter-century after she'd become the 1st woman to hold that position. It'd be an overstatement to say that O'Connor (right) "retired," however, for the former Justice has remained active. (photo credit) Among other things, she's: written the Senate to support CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women that the United States has signed but not ratified; campaigned for an end to the election of state judges; served on a task force on the International Criminal Court convened by the American Society of International Law; and interviewed Justice John Paul Stevens, her just-retired colleague, for Newsweek.

(Prior January 31 posts are here, here, and here.)

SOC on CEDAW

Among those who spoke out in favor of U.S. ratification, in anticipation of mid-November Senate subcommittee hearings on CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, was Sandra Day O'Connor (right), the 1st woman ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. (hat tip)
The November 17 letter to U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) by the former Justice, who served from 1981 to 2006, deserves quotation at length. Here goes:

In my view, this is an important treaty, and it is appropriate that it be considered by the Senate. CEDAW currently has 186 countries which have ratified, including our closest allies. The United States is the only country to have signed, but not ratified, the Convention. Our non-ratification leaves us in the company of the few remaining non-party countries, including Iran and the Sudan. This is not the company we normally keep, and this fact should inform the Senate's consideration of CEDAW.
The United States has made great strides in supporting women's rights. I support CEDAW not because I think it would require changes in women's rights within the United States. Rather, ratification of CEDAW would enhance the authority of the United States to advocate on behalf of women's rights in countries, including both CEDAW parties and non-parties, that do not respect women's rights to the same extent that the United States does. The Senate's failure to ratify CEDAW gives other countries a retort when United States officials raise issues about the treatment of women, and thus our non-ratification may hamper the effectiveness of the United States in achieving increased protection for women worldwide.
A number of countries have ratified CEDAW with reservations, understandings, and/or declarations. The number includes countries like Australia, which has a federal system similar in some ways to our own. It also includes France, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kindgdom. To the extent that Senators have serious concerns about the substance of particular provisions of the Convention, perhaps their concerns could be addressed with a carefully crafted package of reservations, understandings, and declarations.

Next Senate steps regarding efforts toward U.S. ratification of the almost 31-year-old treaty (prior IntLawGrrls posts) are uncertain: a post-hearing Google search points to the same pro and con camps as always.

More women wearing robes

Contained in the cover story of the new ABA Journal is a startling statistic:
Women serve as the Chief Justice in 40% of America's 50 states, more than ever in history.
The proportion of women chiefs is greatest in one corner of the country:

Eight of the 13 Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — have female judges leading their courts of last resort — more than any region in the country.

(Make that 7 of 13; a man took over as chief in Florida on the 1st of this month. Meanwhile, the chief of Texas' highest criminal court, Sharon Keller, has just been reprimanded for her handling of a capital case in 2007.)

Tennessee also joins Michigan and Wisconsin as states in which the majority of the supreme court bench is female. That's 3 women-majority high courts, compared with 2 state high courts -- Idaho and Indiana -- that have no women members.

Nationwide, 26% of state judges and 22% of federal judges are women. An increase, but still laggard compared that with the percentages of women who are law students or law firm associates -- 48% and 45%, respectively.

Provoking particular thought is the article's claim that women owe their success to the election cycle.

The article recounts findings of how Florida's "merit selection" system operated against women, then quotes political consultant Celinda Lake:

'The voters recognize qualities in judicial candidates that the legal and political elites don’t. The elites disqualify a candidate for not going to the right law school or being editor of law review. The people want judges who are good listeners and thoughtful, and women are very strong with voters in those characteristics.'

Gender essentialism aside, the claim might give pause to the country's most vocal opponent of elections for judges: Sandra Day O'Connor, the 1st woman ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

(Photo array of a few of the country's women Chief Justices, clockwise from upper right: Sue Bell Cobb, Alabama; Sarah Parker, North Carolina; Carol W. Hunstein, Georgia; Rebecca White Berch, Arizona; and Barbara A. Madsen, Washington)

Answers to (Judicial) Diversity Quiz

Answers to the (Judicial) Diversity Quiz above:

(1) Sandra Day O'Connor, educated at Stanford both as an undergraduate and law student. At right is Justice O'Connor's official portrait (note the pink blouse), now hanging in the ground-floor gallery at the Court.

(2) As posted, Ronald Reagan nominated O'Connor in 1981.

(3) Reagan, a 1932 graduate of Eureka College in Illinois, is the last U.S. President not to have attended Harvard or Yale. This differently schooled President also nominated 2 others to the high bench who were not products of Harvard or Yale: Robert H. Bork (University of Chicago; Chicago Law) and Douglas H. Ginsburg (Chicago; Cornell Law). Neither was confirmed. In February 1988 the vacancy was filled by Anthony M. Kennedy (Stanford; Harvard Law), whom Justice Harry Blackmun (Harvard; Harvard Law) thus welcomed to his "good old no. 3" club. The 2005 nomination by President George W. Bush (Yale; Harvard MBA) of another person of diverse schooling, his White House Counsel, Harriet Miers (Southern Methodist University; SMU Law), also failed. (A chronology of all nominations to the Supreme Court is here.)

Bonus question: Charles Evans Whittaker, who served on the Court from 1957 to 1962, earned his law degree in 1924 from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Whittaker served with the Court's next-most-recent-public-university-law-grad, Chief Justice Earl Warren (University of California-Berkeley). Appointing both was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Gender, equal protection & immigration

(IntLawGrrls is pleased to welcome back Ruthann Robson, who contributes this guest post, cross-posted from Constitutional Law Prof Blog, regarding the U.S. Supreme Court's announcement yesterday that it will review Flores-Villar v. United States. Ruthann further contributes the Go On! post below)

The question is a narrow one:

► Does decision in Nguyen v. INS (2001) permit gender discrimination that has no biological basis?

In Nguyen, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld 8 U.S.C. § 1409, which imposed different requirements for a child’s acquisition of citizenship depending upon whether the citizen parent is the mother or the father. Writing for the Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy found that the statutory gender-based distinction – applicable when the parents were unmarried, when only parent was a citizen, and when the child was born outside of the United States – survived a constitutional challenge based on the “equal protection guarantee embedded in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” The majority found that the statute served two important governmental interests:

► The importance of assuring that a biological parent-child relationship exists; and

► The importance of assuring that the child and the citizen parent have a demonstrated opportunity or potential to develop the “real, everyday ties that provide a connection between child and citizen parent and, in turn, the United States.”

The Court in Nguyen relied on biological reasoning -- women give birth and men may not even realize their paternity -- and concluded:

Given the 9-month interval between conception and birth, it is not always certain that a father will know that a child was conceived, nor is it always clear that even the mother will be sure of the father’s identity. This fact takes on particular significance in the case of a child born overseas and out of wedlock. One concern in this context has always been with young people, men for the most part, who are on duty with the Armed Forces in foreign countries.

The Court then provided statistics about the number of military men in foreign countries in 1969, the year Nguyen was born in Viet Nam -- although, as the dissenting opinion noted, after Nguyen's parents split up, he lived with the family of his father’s new girlfriend and in 1975, before his sixth birthday, Nguyen came to the United States, where he was raised by his father. A DNA test showed a 99.98% probability of paternity, and the father obtained an order of parentage from a state court.

The Court's grant of certiorari in Flores-Villar v. United States will involve a reconsideration of Nguyen. Flores-Villar was born in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1974 to a noncitizen mother and a United States citizen father who, importantly, was 16 at the time. His father and grandmother, also a citizen, brought Flores-Villar to the United States for medical treatment when he was two months old. He grew up in San Diego with his grandmother and father, who acknowledged paternity with the Civil Registry in Mexico on June 2, 1985. Apparently, Flores-Villar was not in touch with his mother, who remained in Mexico.

The gendered differential imposed by the statute at issue in Flores-Villar was the requirement that a citizen father must have resided in the United States for at least five years after his 14th birthday to confer citizenship on his child, while a citizen mother had to reside in the United States for a continuous period of only one year prior to the child’s birth to pass on citizenship. Moreover, in the case of Flores-Villar, the INS denied a petition for citizenship on the basis that because the citizen father was 16 years old at the time of the child’s birth, it was “physically impossible” for the father to have the required physical presence after the age of 14 in order to comply with the statute.
In the 2008 appellate decision in Flores-Villar to be reviewed, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit -- comprising Judges Pamela Rymer, Cynthia Holcomb Hall, and Andrew J. Kleinfeld -- upheld the statutory scheme. It held the asserted governmental interests -- avoiding statelessness, as well as assuring a link between an unwed citizen father, and this country, to a child born out of wedlock abroad who is to be a citizen -- to be important. The means chosen, it also held, substantially further the objectives. The Court stated:

Though the fit is not perfect, it is sufficiently persuasive in light of the virtually plenary power that Congress has to legislate in the area of immigration and citizenship.

This “fit” will certainly be at issue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissenting opinion in Nguyen, which was joined by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, stressed the heightened scrutiny required by the case involving single-sex education at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute. In that judgment in United States v. Virginia (1996), a closer fit was required between the “discriminatory” means chosen and gender stereotypes. The Nguyen dissenters thus reasoned that the statute at issue in Nguyen was

paradigmatic of a historic regime that left women with responsibility, and freed men from responsibility, for nonmarital children,

and added that it could easily have been rendered sex-neutral.

In Flores-Villar, because the gender differential is a residency requirement -- and not, as in Nguyen, a relationship-with-child requirement -- the “fit” may not be sufficiently tight. If the Court applies VMI, the question will be whether or not there is something unique about men that requires them to have a longer residency than women before men are truly “citizens.” However, the Court will also certainly rely on the plenary power of Congress in the area of citizenship.

Balancing gender equality and citizenship will be the task for the Court -- a task which the newest Justice, Sonia Sotomayor (right), will certainly undertake.

On January 28

On this day in ...

... 1916, in what The New York Times called "a complete surprise to the country," Boston-based attorney Louis D. Brandeis was nominated to become an Associate Justice of the United States' highest court. Just days before, The Times reported, Brandeis had spoken at a meeting called "to demand equal rights for the Jewish people"; upon his confirmation 5 months later, "after a tumultuous hearing process," Brandeis became the 1st Jewish man to serve on the Supreme Court. (credit for portrait of Brandeis by Andy Warhol) Other Supreme Court 1sts include (test your knowledge of Court trivia before clicking on the answer):

► 1st non-U.S.-born Justice, a man;
► 1st Roman Catholic, a man;
► 1st Asia-born Justice, a man;
► 1st African American, a man;

► 1st woman of any background;

► 1st Italian American, a man;
► 1st Jewish woman; and
► most recently, as we've posted, the 1st Latina.

(Prior January 28 posts are here and here.)

The next Justice

Popping into a White House press briefing, President Barack Obama just confirmed that Justice David Souter is retiring after 19 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Souter's resignation letter is here.)
Last night's leak of the news already has opened floodgates of speculation about who will succeed Souter. Will it be:
► A woman? Lots of folks think this is a good idea. It sure would end the isolation that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has often lamented -- most recently, as we posted, just a couple weeks ago -- since the departure of her colleague, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. More women, moreover, sure would make the Court's group photo look more like those of most U.S. law school student bodies, many faculties, and lots of law firms.
► Someone versed in transnational and international law? IntLawGrrls can't help but like the idea, explored in depth here by our colleague Peter Spiro. If this proves a criterion, a few people whose names already are cropping up on short lists jump to mind: Judge Diane P. Wood (below right) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago (same title once held by Obama), who gave a terrific talk on globalization and law at a 2007 conference cosponsored by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Society of International Law; another speaker at that 2007 ASIL/AALS conference, Harold Hongju Koh, Yale Law Dean and State Department Legal Adviser nominee, about whom IntLawGrrls readers know much from these posts; and Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Circuit, a federal jurisdiction/civil procedure professor at California-Berkeley and a participant in talks on globalization and law, among them Réseau ID, in which several IntLawGrrls and Koh also have taken part.
► A Latino/a? Our colleague and California-Davis Law Dean Kevin Johnson has examined this idea in 2 articles, available here and here.
► The 1st openly gay nominee? That's the hope of some, according to this article.
► Someone with significant military experience? Our colleague Eugene R. Fidell, the President of the National Institute of Military Justice now visiting at Yale Law School, made a persuasive argument for that trait in his presentation on the "Security" panel of the March symposium in honor of Justice John Paul Stevens at California-Davis, available now on webcast and soon in print in the UC Davis Law Review.
► Someone whose legal experience comes from the practice rather than from academia or the bench? One name that's already surfaced in this regard is Teresa Wynn Roseborough (left), Chief Litigation Counsel at MetLife, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, former partner at Atlanta's Sutherland Asbill firm, former Stevens clerk, and former Chairman of the Board of the American Constitution Society. Teresa gave a terrific talk on the "Equality" panel at our JPS symposium: drawing on her experience arguing on behalf of Al Gore before the 11th Circuit en banc, she deployed actual chad-cards and actual Florida voting booths to persuade the symposium audience that Justice Stevens and other Supreme Court dissenters in Bush v. Gore (2000) had the better view of the case. (Webcast here.)
All the traits above, and more, no doubt will be weighed as Obama moves toward his ultimate choice. As he does, let's hope he keeps well in mind the overarching criterion Obama himself set at today's press briefing:

'I will seek someone with a sharp and independent mind.'

ICC to go to Gaza?

The Los Angeles Times' Sebastian Rotella reports, from Madrid, that Luis Moreno Ocampo said yesterday the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court "will examine requests to investigate alleged war crimes during the recent combat in the Gaza Strip," about which we've posted.
Report of such an inquiry -- no official statement yet appears at the ICC website -- provokes immediate questions of international law and practice, among them:

► Last week the Palestinian Authority accepted the ICC's jurisdiction, according to Rotella. Even so, is it, for purposes of the Rome Statute of the ICC, a "state" that may become a "party" and so refer a situation on its territory?

Israel's Foreign Ministry gave the Times this categorical "no" to the question:

'The ICC charter is adhered to by sovereign states, and the Palestinian Authority has not yet been recognized as one, so it cannot be a member. It doesn't mean anything except that it's a good propaganda stunt.'

Palestinian Authority's Justice Minister, Dr. Ali Khashan, begged to differ:

'We have the fundamentals of a state and we have met all conditions required from a state. We have been demanding these rights for a long time, but no one has paid attention to us. Now we have decided to go to the ICC with this matter as a first step toward getting our rights through legal means.'

The debate entails questions of ICC statutory interpretation, and promises much pondering of the declaratory and the constitutive theories of statehood.
► As a practical matter, one has to ask what this announcement will mean for U.S. attitudes about the ICC. Softening of opposition was apparent even in the Bush Administration. As a candidate now-President Barack Obama pledged to call together experts to explore whether the United States might join the court. Just Monday, a high-level Task Force of the American Society of International Law called for a U.S. "policy of positive engagement" with the ICC. Detailed recommendations were set out by the Task Force, chaired by Patricia Wald, former judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and William Howard Taft IV, former State Department Legal Adviser; other members: former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies Professor Ruth Wedgwood, former U.S. Rep. Mickey Edwards, Vanderbilt Law School Professor Michael A. Newton, former International Court of Justice President Stephen M. Schwebel, and former Deputy Prosecutor of the ICTY David Tolbert. Its report is welcome and timely -- and may prove an essential counterpoint criticism sure to come from some U.S. corners as a result of Moreno Ocampo's reported decision to examine conduct involving Israel.

On August 8

On this day in ...

... 1988 (10 years ago today), Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (left), then U.N. Secretary-General, said he planned the next day to announce a truce in the 8-year-old war between Iran and Iraq, after Iran announced on this day its acceptance of "Iraq's compromise proposal for a cease-fire." It's estimated that "as many as 750,000 Iranian soldiers and perhaps a third that number of Iraqi troops died on the battlefield."

... 1935, in Kansas City, Missouri, Jane Dee Hull (below right) was born. She "moved to Arizona in 1962 after hearing a Barry Goldwater speech," was elected a state legislator in 1978 and then Arizona's Secretary of State. From the latter post she assumed the post of Governor of Arizona -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor swore in the Republican Hull on September 8, 1997 -- when the incumbent was forced to resign after a federal fraud conviction. Hull, who served until 2003, was the 2d of 3 women to govern Arizona. The other 2, both Democrats, are Rose Mofford (who served 1987-1991) and Hull's successor, current Governor Janet Napolitano.

On April 22

On this day in ...
... 1980, at an army barracks near Monrovia, Liberia, 13 top officials of the deposed government, among them the brother of assassinated President William Tolbert, were publicly executed by shootings that journalists described as "cruel and messy." The executions took place on orders of coup leader Samuel Doe; eventually he would lose power to Charles Taylor, who served as president of Liberia (flag above right) for a decade but now is on trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, sitting at The Hague, Netherlands.
... 2003 (5 years ago today), Martha Wright Griffths (below left) died in Amarda, Michigan, at age 91. Born and raised in Missouri, in 1940 she was graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, and practiced law in that state. In Michigan she served as an elected official -- 1st a legislator, then a judge -- from 1948-54, and again as lieutenant government from 1982-91. As a Member of Congress from 1955-74, Griffiths came to be known as a "graceful feminist": the Democrat introduced the Equal Rights Amendment during her 1st year in Congress, and thereafter fought for its adoption continuously, albeit unsuccessfully. A 1970 Time Magazine article reported:

Although the other nine women Representatives in the House recently urged that she be considered for appointment to the high court because she is a highly competent lawyer as well as legislator, Mrs. Griffiths considers such an event 'out of the range of possibility.'

As we've posted, it'd be another 11 years before the 1st woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, won a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. (photo courtesy Library of Congress)

On this day

On April 7, ...
... 1970, Josina Machel (left), a fighter for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO), died in a gun battle with Portuguese troops. She was the wife and "comrade-in-arms" of Samora Machel, the president of FRELIMO, who would become the 1st President of Mozambique when it gained its independence in 1975. (He later married Graça Machel; as we've posted, she later would become a U.N. Special Rapporteur on the plight of child soldiers.) In Josina's honor Mozambicans observe Women's Day every April 7.
... 2003 (5 years ago today), in Virginia v. Black, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed convictions of 2 persons charged with violating a state's hate crimes law, which prohibited "any person … with the intent of intimidating any person or group … to burn … a cross on the property of another, a highway or other public place," and further provided that cross burning "shall be prima facie evidence of an intent to intimidate a person or group." Based on a principal opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (right) a divided Court rebuffed defendants' claim that the statute violated the free speech guarantees of the 1st Amendment.

Go On! Tribute to Sandra Day O'Connor

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Truly among the 20th century's pathbreaking American women is Sandra Day O'Connor. She was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1930 and raised on a hardscrabble ranch in Arizona, about which she's written in the book below. She went on to be graduated at the top of her class at Stanford Law. Rejected on account of her sex for a law firm position, she worked as a government lawyer, then as a state judge. In 1981, of course, she became the 1st woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she served as an Associate Justice for a quarter-century before retiring in 2006.
Good to see news of a symposium in her honor. "A Tribute to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Reflecting on Justice O'Connor's Jurisprudence Relating to Race and Education," will be held all day on February 22, 2008, at the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (Registration information here.) Speakers include Professors Suzette M. Malveaux, Elizabeth H. Patterson, and Cristina Rodriguez, as well as former Assistant Attorney General Patricia A. Millett.
Hope that in the course of focusing on O'Connor's race/education decisions, participants pay heed to the role played by global context. As I wrote here (p. 1261 & n. 356), O'Connor frequently spoke outside of the Court about the need for dialogue between U.S. judges and their counterparts abroad. She backed those words up with actions, serving both on the American Bar Association's Europe and Eurasia (CEELI) Program and as founding chair of the judicial advisory board of the American Society of International Law. See too her speech to ASIL, just reprinted along with those of other Justices in a new book, A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind…
In her opinions O'Connor was more hesitant to invoke overtly foreign/international laws, norms, and context, as I've written here (pp. 602-03) and here (p. 1334). She thus stood in contrast with the woman who succeeded her on ASIL's advisory board, her colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, about whose affinity to comparative constitutional law we've posted. An exception was O'Connor's opinion for the Court in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). There she grounded her conclusion that government has a compelling interest in diversity -- thus justifying the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan's law school -- on assertions

that the skills needed in today's increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.

Balanced IntLawGrrls?

It seems appropriate on a day that marks the anniversary of Justice O’Connor’s nomination to reflect on the complexities that women face in achieving balance. We’ve come a long way since no law firm would hire as a lawyer a woman who eventually served on the Supreme Court. And yet women who pursue careers in international law as academics and practitioners still face a range of pressures, often very subtle, that can make them feel on the verge of being torn apart. Because of lingering traditional career expectations, we tend to struggle more with mobility in our dual career households. Our biological clocks tick faster than those of our male contemporaries, and we feel conflicting pressures to be in traditional family arrangements and to avoid obstacles to rising careers. Those of us who are not paired feel social pressure to have a family, and those of us who have chosen versions of family that don’t fit married, heterosexual models constantly face legal and cultural obstacles. If we have young children, we tend to face more skepticism about whether we can travel and more criticism if we do.
Each of us charts our own path through these minefields and a rich scholarly literature explores these issues in depth. Moreover, men face their own variation of these struggles, especially when they make non-traditional choices. My husband, for example, faces constant pressure to “get a job” rather than writing and focusing on our child.
For the purposes of this reflection, however, I want to open up a more specific dialogue. As a member of a cohort of women ranging roughly from their early thirties to mid-forties, I have observed many women in both practice and academia struggle to achieve simultaneous personal and professional fulfillment. They make different choices in difficult moments, but the net result is that they often seem precariously balanced. How can law schools and firms recognize and support these small and large struggles more effectively? How can we individually help one another through these moments?

On July 7 ...

... 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced his nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor (both at right), then a state appellate judge in Arizona, to become the 1st woman to serve as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Subsequently receiving the unanimous confirmation of the Senate, O'Connor served a quarter-century, retiring in 2006.
... 2007 (today), denominated 07-07-07, is both the day of a world of Live Earth concerts to raise money and awareness about global warming, and, as we've posted, also the final day of voting for the New 7 Wonders contest about which . But there's no time limit yet on nomination for IntLawGrrls' own Name the World's 7 Legal Wonders contest; send us your nominee to intlawgrrls@gmail.com.
... 1938, U.S. Rep. Julia Carson (D-Ind.) was born in Louisville, Kentucky.

Does sex matter?

'Way back on February 12 Chris Brummer asked at blackprof.com (our newest "connections" link) "Is there such a thing as an 'African-American' foreign policy position?" News this week prompts a question in the same vein:
Is there such a thing as a 'woman's' policy position?
Arguments in the affirmative are well known. There's Carole Gilligan's A Different Voice, as well as the widespread though less erudite sense that women are better listeners, more caring, more nurturing. The notion seems consistent with the "Refugee Roulette" findings that, as Lakshmi Bai wrote, women immigration judges granted asylum 44% more often than men. And yet a look at individual women who've led their countries reveals many counterexamples -- "Iron Ladies" like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, who, for good or ill, pursued policies as tough as those of any tough man.
Swanee Hunt (right) has answer to this enigma. A former U.S. ambassador to Austria now at the Kennedy School, Hunt urges readers of the May/June Foreign Affairs to "Let Women Rule." Though contending that women do govern differently, her essay acknowledges the "'masculinity'" of some past women leaders. What's needed to "change norms," Hunt argues, is a cohort, a "critical mass of female leaders" -- "approximately 30 percent of officeholders have to be female to for a significant effect to be felt on policy."
Surely there's comfort in numbers. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admits to being "'lonely'" since Sandra Day O'Connor retired last year, and Ginsburg's oral dissents in cases that've cut back on women's rights underscore the new singularity of her voice.
But will reaching 30% make policy different? What do you think?