Guest Blogger: Cecilia Marcela Bailliet

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Cecilia Marcela Bailliet (left) as today's guest blogger.
Cecilia is a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo in Norway, where she's Professor, Deputy Director of the Department of Public and International Law, and Director of the Masters Program in Public International Law. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she earned her doctorate at Oslo, based on her thesis entitled "Between Conflict and Consensus: Conciliating Land Disputes in Guatemala, A Study in Preventing and Resolving Internal Displacement." Cecilia also holds a combined J.D./M.A. degree, with honors, from the School of Law and the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Her fields of research and teaching include International Public Law -- her guest post below considers that subject in relation to the global phenomenon of kidnapping -- Human Rights, Women's Rights, Refugee Law, Counter-Terrorism, and Democracy and Constitutionalism, and Refugee Law. Among her many publications is Security: A Multidisciplinary Normative Approach (Brill 2009), an essay collection that Cecilia edited, authors of which include IntLawGrrls' own Naomi Cahn.
Cecilia dedicates her guest post to a woman about whom we've posted before, the French feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (below right). Cecilia writes of Beauvoir:

Her novels and autobiographies provide profound reflection on the life experiences of women, highlighting the importance of intellectually intimate connections between individuals (irrespective of gender), and the urgency of engagement in times of political and societal upheaval. The books that I hold most dear: All Men are Mortal, The Mandarins, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and The Second Sex.
In the last book mentioned, Beauvoir characterizes the dilemmas facing women as such: "Thus woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other."

Heartfelt welcome!

On January 9, ...

... 1908 (100 years ago today), in Paris, a daughter, given the name Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand, was born to a woman of bourgeois upbringing and her husband, a legal secretary. Educated at private Catholic schools, at age 14 the daughter began a lifelong commitment to atheism. As a student at the Sorbonne Simone de Beauvoir took 2d place in the 1929 agrégation examination in philosophy, "barely losing to Jean-Paul Sartre who took first (it was his second attempt at the exam)." The 2 began a storied and lifelong partnership. Perhaps the most noted of Beauvoir's many books is Le Deuxième Sexe, her 1947 work of "philosophy on women from a feminist perspective." Following her death in 1986, Beauvoir (above right) was buried beside Sartre in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery.
... 1964, 21 Panamanians were killed while protesting U.S. control of the Panama Canal, an event marked in the country to this day as Martyr's Day. On this day in 1990, U.S. troops again were in the country, having toppled the government of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega 3 weeks earlier.