On March 26

On this day in ...
... 1913, in Chartres, France, a daughter, Jacqueline, was born to a novelist and her husband, a philosophy professor, who was killed in World War I combat the next year. As a school girl Jacqueline was a top student in Latin and ancient Greek, eventually studying the latter at École Normale Supérieure. Her 1940 marriage would end in divorce; she would be forced out of a teaching job and into hiding because of her Jewish heritage. After World War II, however, Dr. Jacqueline de Romilly (above left) would become a champion of the humanities, "one of France’s leading scholars of Greek civilization and language and only the second woman to be elected to the Académie Française." In 1973, de Romilly became the 1st woman professor at the Collège de France, the prestigious institution now home to IntLawGrrls ' guest/alumna Mireille Delmas-Marty. Professor de Romilly died, at age 97, in December of last year.

(Prior March 26 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Mireille Delmas-Marty

It’s IntLawGrrls’ immense honor to welcome Dr. Mireille Delmas-Marty (right) as a guest blogger.
Mireille is a Professor at the Collège de France, a Paris institution of higher education founded in the 1500s. Holder of the Chair of Comparative Legal Studies and Internationalization of Law at the Collège, she publishes frequently in that subject area and also directs 3 scholarly networks on the internationalization of law: the French-Chinese, the French-Brazilian, and the French-American (participants have included 4 contributors to IntLawGrrls, Hélène Ruiz Fabri, Vivian Grosswald Curran, Naomi Norberg, and me).
I’ve had the honor of calling Mireille collègue since University of Vienna Law Professor Frank Höpfel, with whom I'd corresponded while researching global developments in criminal procedure for my Harmonic Convergence? article, kindly pointed me to her work. Then a Professor of Law at Université de Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Mireille also was coordinating Corpus Juris, a project aimed at establishing for the European Union a penal code that bridged common law and civil law systems. At the same time, she’s written widely on international criminal law, and on transnational and international developments in other areas of law, among them trade and the environment.
In 1969 Mireille earned her Ph.D. in criminal law from Paris 1, whose law faculty she joined after teaching at Lille and Paris XI. Throughout her career, as detailed in her c.v., she’s been active in many organizations and earned many honors. Among them are honorary doctorates from the universities of Liège, Urbino, Uppsala, Beijing, Louvain, Montreal, and Ferrara. She’s served as a Visiting Professor of Law at universities throughout the world, as Vice President of the International Association of Penal Law, as Editor in Chief and then Director of the Revue de science criminelle et de droit pénal comparé, as a board member of the Journal of International Criminal Justice, and as a legal expert on many committees by appointment of the French government and European entities. Mireille is an Officer in France’s Légion d’Honneur and a Commander in the French National Order of Merit.
Our colleague William A. Schabas, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, gave this succinct yet apt description of Mireille:

She is one of the great thinkers of our time on issues concerning law and society.

As a guest blogger, Mireille contributes a 3-part series -- the 1st post is below -- comparing U.S. and French approaches to the evolving world of transnational law. It outlines ideas that Mireille sets forth in detail in her most recent book, Ordering Pluralism: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Transnational Legal World (2009) (prior post), translated into English by IntLawGrrl Naomi Norberg.
For reasons she sets forth in a bilingual guest post further below, Mireille's chosen to honor the abstract painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, who joins other foremothers in IntLawGrrls' list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!