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Join Wald, Dudziak, many more at IntLawGrrls conference here: Call for papers deadline extended to Jan. 9

With thanks to all of you who’ve already submitted proposals for IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference here at the University of Georgia School of Law, we’re pleased both to extend the call for papers deadline till Monday, January 9, and to report on how the conference is shaping up:

► Festivities will begin on Thursday, March 2, 2017. That afternoon, from 3:30 to 5 p.m., Georgia Law’s Women Law Students Association will host the 35th annual Edith House Lecture, featuring Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Our conference will open the same evening, at 7 p.m. at Ciné, with a screening of “500 Years,” Pamela Yates’ documentary about Guatemala set to premiere at the January 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Following the screening will be a conversation with Yates, the film’s director and an IntLawGrrls contributor, and with the producer, Paco de Onís.

► A feature of the next day – the Friday, March 3 Research Forum – will be a plenary panel on “strategies to promote women’s participation in shaping international law and policy amid the global emergence of antiglobalism.” Among the speakers of this still-in-formation panel will be these IntLawGrrls contributors:

  • waldHonorable Patricia M. Wald, who’s currently serving by Presidential appointment on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and who’s career has included service as a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit;
  • dudziakEmory Law Professor Mary Dudziak, a legal historian of the post-World War II era and the new President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Law; and
  • bvsConference co-organizer and Stanford Law Visiting Professor Beth Van Schaack, an expert in international criminal law and the laws of war and former Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State.

► Filling the balance of Friday, March 3 (before, that is, our evening conference dinner) will be Research Forum presentations by panelists drawn from our call for papers. We’re delighted to extend the deadline for such proposals till Monday, January 9 – and to report that several dozen proposals already have been submitted (and many already accepted, on a rolling basis).

  • They’ve come not only from the United States – California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. – but also, in keeping with our global reach, from Canada, France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
  • Expertise is multidisciplinary – among those submitting are policymakers, clinicians and center directors, NGO representatives, students, and professors, in law, psychology, history, political science/international relations, anthropology.
  • Topics are global, too, treating issues in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Caribbean,  and Europe: the economy (comparative corporate law, corporate social responsibility, international trade); the environment (environmental protection, climate change, gender empowerment); rights (human rights, reproductive rights, women’s rights); humanitarian law and peace and security (genocide, global and human security, terrorism, lethal autonomous weapons); international organizations (enforcement mechanisms like the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court, plus U.N. responsibility related to the Haiti cholera outbreak);  international law theory (role of civil society, feminist approaches to international law (in French and English); law enforcement (policing youth, evidence-gathering); armed conflict/postconflict (reparations, the Cold War); and sex and gender (women’s participation in international judging, warfare, and religious practice, as well as issues related to sexual and gender-based violence).

We welcome your participation, too. Click for more information and to submit a proposal.

(Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls)

Pamela Yates’ new Guatemala film “500 Years” to screen at IntLawGrrls conference in March at Georgia Law

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A very special film event will open IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference, the global gathering we’re very pleased to host this spring.

On the evening of Thursday, March 2, 2017, the conference will begin with a screening of “500 Years,” a documentary about Guatemala. This Athens, Georgia, screening – taking place just weeks after the film’s premiere at the 2017 Sundance Festival – will feature a conversation with its award-winning director, Pamela Yates (below), and producer, Paco de Onís. Yates, who describes herself as “an American filmmaker and human rights defender,” has posted on her work at IntLawGrrls (see here and here), which is celebrating a decade as the pre-eminent international law blog written primarily by women.

yates_pamela“500 Years” concludes a Guatemala trilogy begun with “When the Mountains Tremble” (1983) and “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator” (2011), As described at the Skylight Pictures website:

“From a historic genocide trial to the overthrow of a president, ‘500 Years’ tells a sweeping story of mounting resistance played out in Guatemala’s recent history, through the actions and perspectives of the majority indigenous Mayan population, who now stand poised to reimagine their society.”

On Friday, March 3, 2017, IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference will continue with the daylong Research Forum at the University of Georgia School of Law Dean Rusk International Law Center.  As introduced in prior posts, this Forum will feature presentations by international law academics, practitioners, and policymakers, plus a plenary panel on “strategies to promote women’s participation in shaping international law and policy amid the global emergence of antiglobalism.”

This IntLawGrrls event is part of the law school’s Georgia Women in Law Lead (Georgia WILL) initiative and of the Global Georgia Initiative of the university’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Additional conference cosponsors include Georgia Law’s Women Law Students Association and International Law Society, the American Society of International Law and ASIL’s Women in International Law Interest Group, and the Planethood Foundation.

Details on the conference are at the webpage containing the call for papers (deadline January 1, 2017).

(Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls. Credit for Skylight Pictures’ photo above, by Daniel Hernández-Salazar; source for photo of Yates)

Travel grants to help students and early-career persons take part in IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference

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A scene from IntLawGrrls’ last conference, “Women in International Criminal Law,” October 29, 2010, at the American Society of International Law

Delighted to announce that we will be able to make it easier for some students or very-early-career persons whose papers are accepted for “IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference” to take part in this daylong celebration.

Thanks to the generosity of the Planethood Foundation, we have established a fund that will provide small grants to help defray the costs of travel to and accommodation at our conference, to be held March 3, 2017, at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, Athens, Georgia USA. The law school is hosting as part of its Georgia Women in Law Lead initiative.

We’re pleased too to announce two additional conference cosponsors: the American Society of International Law and ASIL’s Women in International Law Interest Group (WILIG).

As detailed in our call for papers/conference webpage and prior posts, organizers Diane Marie Amann, Beth Van Schaack, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Kathleen A. Doty welcome paper proposals from academics, students, policymakers, and advocates, in English, French, or Spanish, on all topics in international, comparative, foreign, and transnational law and policy.

In addition to paper workshops, there will be at least one plenary panel, on “strategies to promote women’s participation in shaping international law and policy amid the global emergence of antiglobalism.”

The deadline for submissions will be January 1, 2017. Students or very-early-career person who would like to be considered for one of these grants to help defray travel costs are asked to indicate this in their submissions. Papers will be accepted on a rolling basis – indeed, we’ve already received several – so we encourage all to submit as soon as they are able.

For more information, see the call for papers or e-mail doty@uga.edu.

(Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls)

Founder of IntLawGrrls extends invitation to blog’s 10th Birthday Conference, March 3 at Georgia Law

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Why IntLawGrrls?

The need for an online forum giving voice to women who work in international law and policy began to take shape 10 years ago this autumn.

An issue of the day was Guantánamo; specifically, what was the United States to do now that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a June 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, had ruled President George W. Bush’s military commissions unconstitutional?

Many women had worked, spoken, or written on GTMO – not only in law review articles, but also in court pleadings. I was one of them, having published “Guantánamo” in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law in 2004 and served in 2006 as principal author of the amicus brief in Hamdan filed jointly by the National Institute of Military Justice and the Bar Association of the District of Columbia.

And yet, when Congress convened post-Hamdan hearings, witness after witness was exclusively male. Worse still, the perspectives these men advanced by no means covered the spectrum – no surprise given that all of them had served in the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, and only one staked any claim to expertise in human rights law. Nothing approximating either a nongovernmental or feminist perspective surfaced in those sessions on Capitol Hill.

News accounts of such manels got me thinking about launching a blog.

Opinio Juris, founded in November 2004, had revealed an international law community rife with readers and contributors. But posts by women were few, as was then and remains today the case on digital platforms. I imagined that a blog open only to women might attract women – that women would see it as both an invitation and an obligation to contribute. Going pink would set a strong contrast with OJ‘s baby-blue image.

The name? “IntLaw” was easy, and for obvious reasons.

“Grrls” was obvious too. The spelling’s angry “grr” owes much to the circa-1990s Riot Grrrls; the concept, to the Guerrilla Girls, a group that since 1985 has been wreaking feminist havoc in the male-dominated art world. (Years later, we would recognize Pussy Riot, a band-turned-movement that, like Guerrilla Girls, remains active.)

dowomenhavetobenaked2005smallrgbAs the Guerrilla Girls’ website recalls:

“They assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their personalities.”

And so did IntLawGrrls. Well, not the gorilla masks (at least not in public). But in the infant months after our birth-day on March 3, 2007, each of us assumed the name of a foremother as our pseudonym, and posted in her honor. I was Gráinne Ni Mháille, or Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate who also would be embraced by contributors Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Gráinne de Búrca. A charter contributor, Beth Van Schaack, took the name of her distant relative, Eleanor Roosevelt. It will come as little surprise to learn that others followed suit in honoring ER, who remains our blog’s proto-foremother. Another early contributor, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, posted in the name of the 19th Century Indian queen Lakshmi Bai.

A half-dozen months and scores of contributors later, we ‘Grrls began posting in our own names, though we continued to name foremothers both in introductory posts and in an honor roll posted online. Kathleen A. “Kate” Doty, for example, thus paid homage to Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai‘i.

clearerwicl_posterOver time, Beth, Jaya, Kate, and I evolved into the editors of IntLawGrrls. Our collaboration included hosting a conference at Tillar House, the American Society of International Law headquarters, and publishing a special issue of the International Criminal Law Review, dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald, on “Women and International Criminal Law.” We worked together through December 2012, when the blog took a couple-months’ hiatus and then revived. It’s been wonderful to watch the replenishment of energy and contributors at this new URL, thanks to Cecilia Marcela Bailliet and many others.

Then as now – nearly 10 years, hundreds of contributors, and thousands of posts later – IntLawGrrls mentors new voices and fosters community among contributors at all stages of their careers. Our periodic group photos are evidence of that. (At top is our photo from last spring’s ASIL annual meeting, when IntLawGrrl Betsy Andersen, 2d from right in top row, earned the Prominent Woman in International Law Award.)

To celebrate our utterly unexpected achievement, we’re throwing a party.

georgiawill_logoBeth, Jaya, Kate, and I have reunited to organize IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference. We welcome all of our vast IntLawGrrls community to join us on Friday, March 3, 2017 – on the precise date of our 10th birthday – at my home institution, the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, Athens, Georgia USA, which is hosting as part of our Georgia WILL initiative.

Details and our call for papers are available at our conference website and in the item Jaya posted last week. Suffice it to say that we welcome proposals, in English, French, or Spanish, from all in our community. Topics may include any issue of international, comparative, foreign, or transnational law or policy. We especially welcome contributions from subfields traditionally dominated by men. Academics and practitioners, students and professors, advocates and policymakers alike are most welcome to submit.

We’re planning a plenary aimed at getting us through the next several years – title is “strategies to promote women’s participation in shaping international law and policy amid the global emergence of antiglobalism” – and we hope to organize a few more according to participants’ interests. We look forward to an opportunity to network, to meet old friends and make new ones, to celebrate our accomplishments and lay plans for greater achievements in the coming decade.

I thank all of you for your support of our efforts this last decade, and look forward to seeing many of you here in March.

‘Nuff said.

(Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls blog, and written in personal capacity, as blog’s founder)