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'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.'

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'Men have to be reminded that women exist.'

-- Eleanor Roosevelt, in what New York Times columnist Gail Collins called a "tartly" delivered comment to reporters. It was made, presumably, in 1960 or 1961; the occasion, Collins writes, was the announcement of "the all-male list" of senior appointees in the new administration of President John F. Kennedy. (credit for March 1961 photo of ER and JFK) This criticism by Roosevelt -- among IntLawGrrls' very 1st transnational foremothers -- prompted Kennedy to issue Executive Order 10980 (1961), which established the President's Commission on the Status of Women. The work of the 3-year commission, which Roosevelt chaired till her death in 1962, has been complemented by Women in America, a report on women and girls in the United States just released by the White House Council on Women and Girls.

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[T]he Grand Chamber's judgment exposes flaws in the current European asylum regime. ... [E]stablished to reduce 'asylum shopping' and ensure minimum standards of protection to asylum seekers across the European Union, [it] is based on a presumption of equality and cooperation among safe countries. For geopolitical reasons, [there is] an unbalanced burden-sharing among the various European countries.
The judgment acknowledges those challenges, yet underlines that neither uneven burden-distribution (Greece) nor a state's minimalist reaading of the Dublin Regulation (Belgium) absolves Member States of their responsibilities vis-à-vis the Convention or other applicable international treaties ....

-- Tom Syring, co-chair of the International Refugee Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law and member of Norway's Immigration Appeals Board, in an ASIL Insight written in his personal capacity. Syring analyzed the judgment that the European Court of Human Rights (right) issued this January in M.S.S. v. Belgium & Greece. An asylum case, M.S.S. unfolded within the framework of the Common European Asylum System -- launched in 1999 and better known as CEAS -- as well as the 2003 Dublin Regulation that implements CEAS. A 17-member Grand Chamber of the Court ruled that both respondent countries had violated rights of the asylee-applicant under Article 3 (banning inhuman and degrading treatment) and Article 13 (guaranteeing an effective remedy) of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. Belgium was faulted for having returned the applicant to his 1st state of entry -- Greece -- without considering that there he might endure the poor living conditions and risk of refoulement to his native Afghanistan. Greece, meanwhile, was held to account for the possibility of such risks and for the delays in providing the remedy of asylum. By Syring's telling, the judgment appears to place a significant, affirmative responsibility on member states -- and thus is well worth a read for international lawyers in many fields beyond that of asylum law.

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'[I]f you want to confine your energies to big fish, you need larger holes. Otherwise, you'll spend all your time picking out the sardines, minnows, and plastic bottles. One of the greatest challenges of international criminal justice is the selection of cases. Resources must be focused using the concept of 'those who bear the greatest responsibility' or something similar.

-- Our colleague William A. Schabas, Professor of Human Rights Law, and Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland-Galway, in "Prosecuting Dr Strangelove, Goldfinger, and the Joker at the International Criminal Court: Closing the Loopholes," published in a Leiden Journal of International Law forum on the policy element included in the ICC definition of crimes against humanity. At issue, to be precise, is Article 7(2)(a) of the Rome Statute, which requires that the requisite anti-civilian attack occur "pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack." Schabas' concluding essay constitutes a biting smackdown of proposals to relax the requirement.

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She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.

-- New York Times article referring to Erin Parker, a Wisconsin high school teacher. Total "'Nuff said" about the current state of public education.

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To combat insurgents and protect civilians simultaneously, governments could choose to use ground troops, which are arguably better equipped to discriminate between innocent bystanders and insurgents and their accomplices. Although militaries risk significantly higher casualties by deploying their troops rather than dropping precision bombs, this sacrifice is precisely what the logic of just war requires: that civilians not become more expendable than a country's armed forces.

-- Dr. Charli Carpenter (left), Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in "Fighting the Laws of War: Protecting Civilians in Asymmetric Conflict," a review essay appearing in the current edition of Foreign Affairs. Carpenter takes issue with authors who argue, from the left and the right, that extant laws of war are insufficient to meet the challenges of contemporary military engagements.

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On this International Women's Day:

VAWA is up for reauthorization this year. While VAWA is a landmark piece of legislation that has, for the past 15 years, provided needed money to domestic violence shelters and legal services, it must go further. VAWA 2011 should include robust provisions that create accountability for government officials — especially law enforcement — when they turn a blind eye to women and children in need. Many police officers are doing their best to protect these marginalized, vulnerable populations. But those who are not should be held accountable. Congress must reauthorize VAWA, specifically a version requiring the Department of Justice to initiate investigations when bad cops turn their backs on domestic-violence victims and their children. . . For our mothers, sisters and friends, let us protect our human right to life — a life without violence.

-- From an op-ed in today's Miami Herald by Miraisy Rodriguez and Farrah Elchahal, law students at the University of Miami's Human Rights Clinic, run by guest/alumna Carrie Bettinger-Lopez

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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)

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'Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.'

-- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (right), referring to a Qatar-based media outlet (cited in posts in our North Africa series) during her testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week.
Care to wager how long before U.S. cable stations begin picking up AJE?

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... The Court essentially concludes that international custom requires that international(ized) tribunals try international crimes, whereas national courts can have jurisdiction only if such crimes had already been incorporated into national law when they were committed.
The assertion of such a custom is difficult to harmonize with a whole range of cases in which national courts have retroactively asserted jurisdiction over international crimes. ...

-- Jan Arno Hessbruegge, who works as a legal advisor for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a personal-capacity ASIL Insight on the November 2010 judgment of the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Union of West African States in Hissein Habré c. République du Sénégal. We've posted here, here, and here about the court of ECOWAS, a regional organization whose members include not only Senegal, but also Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Hessbruegge's Insight is skeptical about the reasoning of the ECOWAS Court in this case. And he rightly points out that it raises the potential for conflicting judgments in cases involving former Chadian dictator Habré -- not necessarily the 2009 decision of the African Court of Human and People's Rights about which we've posted, but rather the eventual judgment in Questions relating to the Obligation to Prosecute or Extradite (Belgium v. Senegal), pending before the International Court of Justice. (credit for © 2005 Madjiasra Nako/IRIN photo of "[w]idows protest[ing] in the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, demanding the extradition of Hissène Habré to Belgium to face charges of crimes against humanity")

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Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it's time to try something totally different, like putting into action, for the first time in history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325.

-- The provocative lead paragraph of a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Ann Jones, entitled "In Afghanistan, a woman's place is at the peace table." Jones, author of books on Afghanistan and women and armed conflict, stresses the promise of full implementation of Resolution 1325 on Women and Peace and Security, which (as detailed in IntLawGrrls posts available here) the Security Council adopted on October 31, 2000. The commentary derives from Jones' longer post at TomDispatch blog. (credit for photo by Jones of Afghan women) In similar vein, see this recent IntLawGrrls post by guests/alumnae Christine Bella and Catherine O'Rourke.

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'I have never felt as at peace and as safe as I did during those days in Tahrir. There was a sense of coexistence that overcame all of the problems that usually happen - whether religious or gender based.'

-- Mona Seif (above left), a 24-year-old researcher who helped organize demonstrations in Cairo that led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts.) Seif was quoted in an Al Jazeera English article and video entitled "Women of the revolution" by Fatma Naib (right). The item appeared amid news of continuing political unrest -- and some violent crackdowns against same -- in countries including Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen.

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Nearby were framed photos of her idols: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These days, though, Karman is most inspired by her peers. 'Look at Egypt,' she said with pride. 'We will win.'

-- Reporter Sudarsan Raghavan, in yesterday's Washington Post profile of Tawakkol Karman (right). The head of an organization called Women Journalists Without Chains, she's using the internet to push for change in her native country of Yemen, site of unrest for the last several days. Karman's received death threats, been attacked by a mob, and detained by police for 38 hours. (photo credit)

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Because of our policy in supporting autocrats in that part of the world, ElBaradei's record of standing up to the U.S. in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion bolsters his credibility within Egypt, where he has not lived for many years.

-- Our colleague Bert B. Lockwood (below right), Editor-in-Chief of Human Rights Quarterly and Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Director of the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights at the University of Cincinnati, in an op-ed about Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Bert's colleague since both were at the Center for International Studies at New York University in the 1970s. Later the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel Peace Prizewinner, ElBaradei has emerged as a spokesperson for opponents of the current regime in Egypt. (credit for above left Reuters/Asmaa Waguih photo; video interview here.) Bert's op-ed provides welcome background on ElBaradei -- and acts as a complement to Scott Shane's thought-provoking New York Times piece, "America's Journeys With Strongmen."

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'Surely there are women who could make up a third of attendees.'

-- Author/activist Marie Wilson (below right), quoted in a Bloomberg article critical of the failure of the Davos World Economic Forum yet again to include at least 30% women in its gatherings. That figure, the article said, is the critical mass, the tipping point, "the level social scientists have found integrates women’s points of view into discussions." A "new policy to attract more women executives" to the annual gabfest in the Swiss Alps -- about which we've previously posted here, here, and here -- seems to have boosted the percentage to "close to 20 percent this year, up from 16 percent last year."

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Time will tell whether the legal framework for liability and redress for damage caused by [living modified organisms] will be governed primarily by public actors concerned with preserving both biodiversity and sovereignty or largely by private multinational actors concerned with preserving open markets.

-- Our colleague Anastasia Telesetsky (below right), Associate Professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, in an ASIL Insight. She details recent international legal efforts to regulate the production and distribution of living modified organisms – biotech products like disease-free mosquitoes. (credit for Centers for Disease Control photo of genetically engineered mosquito) Such products are known in the field as LMOs, but perhaps more commonly as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. (prior post) The most recent international legal effort, and the focus of Telesetsky’s Insight, is the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol, a multilateral treaty that won the support of 116 states at a October 2010 session including parties to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and to the 2000 Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to that convention.

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'I don’t even have to read the briefs, for Pete’s sake.'

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (right), in a just-published interview with California-Hastings Law Professor Calvin Massey, about which we also posted here. (2008 photo credit) Scalia spoke in explanation of the scope of questions that he deems easily decided by his originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. In the Justice's words:

'We don’t have the answer to everything, but by God we have an answer to a lot of stuff ... especially the most controversial: whether the death penalty is unconstitutional, whether there’s a constitutional right to abortion, to suicide ....'

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So should we, perhaps, be content with the virtual moratorium on nuclear testing?
No, because commitments that are not legally binding can easily be violated.

-- Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. These 2 sentences from Gorbachev's New York Times op-ed pithily point out the importance of treaties, on much the same reasoning as in a prior post by yours truly. Gorbachev's objective? He begins by welcoming the just-before-Christmas approval by the U.S. Senate of the New Start disarmament treaty (prior posts), which Russia's expected to ratify next month. Then he moves quickly to his main goal: secure U.S. ratification as well of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Russia and 34 others of the 44 "nuclear technology holder states" have ratified. The United States is among the holdouts, the Senate having refused to give its advice and consent in 1999. U.S. approval of CTBT would break the logjam, Gorbachev argues, and so make way for "the next step to a world free of nuclear weapons"-- a stated goal of the current American President and many who have preceded him.

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'I'm most comfortable wearing slacks, and well, for a woman to come on the floor in trousers was viewed as a seismographic event.'

-- U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (right), recalling her 1st day in the chamber of the Senate, following her election in 1986. The Maryland Democrat's comment came in a CNN.com interview. The occasion?

When she is sworn in for a fifth term in January, Mikulski will become the longest serving woman in Senate history, breaking the 24-year record held by the late GOP Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.

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Leaders from Britain, the United States, France and China -- along with Russia, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- have all visited India in the last six months, securing contracts worth a total of around $50 billion.

-- A Reuters report today from New Delhi, where Dmitry Medvedev, President of one of the P-5 countries listed in the snippet, declared Russia's support for giving India a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. (image credit) Medvedev's announcement follows the New Delhi statement earlier this month, when President Nicolas Sarkozy said France too now supports adding India as a "P-6" -- not to mention President Barack Obama's announcement in November, as we then posted, that "a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member" is the United States' goal as well. The lining up of these ducks in a row makes for a fascinating study in politico-market emergence.