On November 7

On this day in ...
... 1943, Silvia Rose Cartwright (right) was born in Dunedin, New Zealand. She studied at the Otago Girls' High School in the same town, as well as the University of Otago, from which she earned her LL.B. degree in 1967. Since then, she's served as the 1st woman Chief District Judge, the 1st woman on New Zealand's High Court, and the 2d woman Governor-General of New Zealand. On the last post, WikiPedia writes:

Dame Silvia's term as Governor-General was from 4 April 2001 to 4 August 2006. This was the first (and so far only) time when the Monarch (Elizabeth II), Governor-General, Chief Justice (Dame Sian Elias), Speaker of the House (Margaret Wilson) and Prime Minister (Helen Clark) of a Commonwealth Realm were all female.

While a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, she helped to draft the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Since 2007, Cartwright's been a Judge on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

(Prior November 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On this day

On March 13, ...
... 1949, Rt. Hon. Dame Sian Elias (left) was born in London, England, the daughter of a father of Armenian heritage and a mother of Welsh heritage. Educated at Auckland University in New Zealand and Stanford University in the United States, she became a barrister in Auckland in the early 1970s. Appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1988 and a High Court judge in 1995, she became New Zealand's 1st woman Chief Justice, a position she holds to this day, in 1999. That same year she was named Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and appointed to the Privy Council. She also serves as Administrator of the Government, the person who would assume the duties of the Governor-General, the "personal representative of" the "Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II of New Zealand," if the Governor-General should be unable to perform those duties.
... 1979, "members of the New Jewel party, a left-wing opposition group" in parliament, staged a coup d'état in Grenada, a Caribbean island state. The group's leader, Maurice Bishop, would govern until October 1983, when he was killed by "supporters of his deputy, Bernard Coard, who resented attempts to mend bridges with the US," according to BBC, which added that "[l]ater that month 6,000 US troops invaded Grenada." Detention occurring during the 1983 military action was held violative of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in Coard v. United States, a 1999 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights about which I've written here.