Guest Blogger: Felice Batlan

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Felice Batlan (left) as today's guest blogger.
Felice is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent College of Law. She joined that faculty in 2006; before that, she taught at Tulane Law School. At Chicago-Kent, Felice teaches corporate law, securities regulation, legal history, and feminist legal theory. We've posted on her feminist legal history scholarship here and here. In her guest post below, she situates Florence Kelley (1859-1932) -- a lawyer and social-political reformer active on issues including women's suffrage, the labor movement, and children's rights -- in the struggle against laissez-faire industrialism that had been sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in cases like Lochner v. New York (1905).
Before entering academia, Felice spent 9 years in legal practice, as a corporate and litigation associate in New York and as head of global compliance and associate general counsel at Greenwich Capital Markets. After that, she earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from New York University. Felice also holds a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, and a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Smith College. After law school, she served as a law clerk for Judge Constance Baker Motley, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York -- an IntLawGrrls foremother!
Honors that Felice has received include: the IIT Julia Beveridge Award for service to students; a 2003 fellowship at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and the 2003 Dissertation Writing Award of the Coordinating Council For Women in History / Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians.
Felice has served as: an associate editor and book review editor of Continuity and Change, an academic journal dedicated to exploring the legal and social structures of past societies; an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (David Tanenhaus ed., 2008), with responsibility for sections on corporations, women, gender, and sexuality; and as a member of the board of the H-Net website for humanities and social sciences. She's also been an adviser to the historical society of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Dedicating her post to Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871-1945), Felice writes:

Harriet Boyd Hawes was on of the first professional women archeologists. In the late 19th century, she studied at the American School in Athens and spent the next years on Crete excavating a number of important sites. Eventually Hawes taught at both Smith and Wellesley. Like so many women “firsts” she would not accept no as an answer and lived her life adventurously and often defiantly.

Boyd Hawes (above right; photo credit) joins Judge Baker Motley and other foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Go On! Constance Baker Motley Symposium

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Professor Marilyn Ford advises readers to save the date 18 September 2009 for a symposium in tribute to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley (below right), an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother thanks to our own Amy Senier. (photo credit)
Senior U.S. District Court Judge Baker Motley (1921-2005) was, and is, a giant of the U.S. civil rights movement and legal profession. According to her autobiography, Equal Justice Under Law (1999), Baker Motley was galvanized to take action against racism early in life. (IntLawGrrls posts here.)
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis, Constance Baker was denied access to local public recreation areas as a teenager. She set out to become a civil rights attorney despite the many economic, racial, and gender barriers ahead of her.
Baker attended Fisk University and earned degrees from New York University and Columbia Law School. Judge Baker Motley was the first African-American woman appointed to the U.S. federal judiciary, the first African-American woman New York State Senator, and the first woman to serve as Manhattan Borough President.
The young Constance Baker is said to have shown her mother a “For Colored Persons Only” sign she had pulled down from a wall. She wryly noted that it had been reasonable for her to do so since the sign was evidently “for” people of color. She proceeded to break it in half, vowing to work against racial segregation and discrimination. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Judge Baker Motley’s subsequent trailblazing career in a 2005 tribute, “Human Rights Hero”.
Co-sponsored by Quinnipiac University School of Law and by Yale Law School, the event, “Constance Baker Motley: A Symposium on Her Life and Work,” will take place on Quinnipiac’s campus.
Scheduled panelists include leading civil rights scholars, lawyers, judges, historians, and journalists such as Lani Guinier, Elaine Jones, Drew S. Days, James B. Farmer, William E. Forbath, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. Charles J. Ogletree, and Juan Williams. For registration information contact Professor Ford with a cc to Lauren Carolla at Lauren.Carolla@quinnipiac.edu .
It's great to see a true human rights hero being recognized in this way.

Guest blogger Amy Senier and IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack in dialogue on U.N. development

It's our great pleasure to feature a dialogue between today's guest blogger, Amy Senier (left), and IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack. The topic of the 1st and 2d posts? The Security Council's adoption of a reasolution on sexual violence and war.
Amy's a recent graduate of 2 Boston institutions: Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, home to another IntLawGrrl, Hope Lewis, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she concentrated on international human rights and on law and development. During her legal studies, she interned at the Legal Resources Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Amy was a participant in the 2006 Sherman and Sterling International Rounds of the Jessup International Moot Court Competition and has volunteered for the Massachusetts-based NGO Physicians for Human Rights and for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Prior to attending law school, Amy was a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia.
She writes in honor of Constance Baker Motley (below right), the African-American attorney and civil rights advocate who earlier was the subject of an IntLawGrrls profile here. Motley, who litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court and other tribunals, became the 1st African-American woman on the federal bench when she was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1966. She served on that court for nearly 40 years; for 4 of them, she served as the 1st African-American woman Chief Judge. Motley, who today joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers listed in the righthand column just below the "visiting from ..." map, died in 2005 at at 84.

Heartfelt welcome!

On September 28, ...

... 2005, Constance Baker Motley, Senior Judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, died at age 84 of congestive heart failure. Daughter of emigrants from the West Indies, in 1944 she became the 1st African-American woman accepted at Columbia Law School, from which she was graduated in 1946. Soon after she began to work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. During her 16 years of practice there she "was the only woman on the legal team in the historic legal challenge to school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education," and, as depicted at left, also served as "lead counsel for James Meredith in his successful battle to gain admission to University of Mississippi." Motley won 9 of the 10 cases she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually she entered city and state politics in New York. In 1966, she became the 1st African-American woman federal district judge; 20 years later, the 1st woman Chief Judge in New York's Southern District.

... 1961, the United Arab Republic came to an end when the military staged a coup in Damascus. The UAR had been formed on Feb. 1, 1958, as a union of Syria and Egypt; the latter country kept the name for another 10 years, then became the Arab Republic of Egypt on Sept. 2, 1971.