sex/gender

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann profiled by ATLAS women

img_2013cropProfessor Diane Marie Amann, holder of the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law and our Center’s Faculty Co-Director, was profiled at ATLAS yesterday, in a post written by the organization’s co-founder, barrister Sareta Ashraph.

ATLAS, which stands for “Acting Together: Law, Advice, Support,” is a community of female-identifying lawyers, activists, and jurists with expertise in public international law. Founded in 2012, the organization aims to create a space where women in the field can reach out to each other for information, career advice, and mentoring. ATLAS builds upon and is complementary to the ethos of IntlLawGrrls, a blog Amann founded in 2007. Her charter coeditors, as she notes, were Beth Van Schaack, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and our Center’s Director, Kathleen A. Doty. Amann joins 8 other women so far featured by ATLAS.atlas+empowered+women+empower+women

In her profile, Amann reflects on her career path and its high points, including teaching, working with inspirational people such as Mireille Delmas-Marty, clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and serving as Special Adviser on children’s issues to Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Amann also comments on diversity of the profession, noting:

“Many (or perhaps, only some) in the profession have become more aware and more vocal on the need for diversity when it comes to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. That has not yet translated into a level of progress that is both right and required. At the same time, there have been far fewer conversations, and less awareness, of the lack of diversity within our profession when it comes to class. There seem to be few international lawyers who come from a working-class background, who are in their family’s first college-going generation.”

Amann goes on to offer advice to young women hoping to work in international law: follow your heart; move towards the positive; never stop learning; build a network of friends and mentors; build skills; and find time to do the things that make you happy.

Read the full profile here.

Professor Amann’s draft “Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal” @ SSRN

Coomee Rustom Strooker-Dantra, 1937 (credit)

I’m very pleased to have posted a draft of my most recent paper, Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal, online. The work arises out of my ongoing scholarly research into the roles that women and others played in the post-World War II international criminal trials. (prior posts) This research focuses primarily on trials at Nuremberg rather than at Tokyo; however, as this essay indicates, the issues and even the personnel in the two forums overlapped considerably.

Many women are brought to the fore in Glimpses; for example: 5 American lawyers, Virginia Bowman, Lucille Brunner, Eleanor Jackson, Helen Grigware Lambert, Grace Kanode Llewellyn, and Bettie Renner; 1 Dutch lawyer, Coomee Rustom Strooker-Dantra, who had been born in what is now Myanmar; and 1 American, memoir-writer Elaine B. Fischel, who assisted defense counsel but did not herself  become a lawyer until after her Tokyo service.

From left, Eleanor Jackson, Virginia Bowman, Grace Kanode Llewellyn, Bettie Renner, and Lucille Brunner, in Los Angeles Times, 15 April 1946 (credit)

Other women also figure – including some who have been introduced into the Tokyo narrative through a documentary, a feature film, and a miniseries, each analyzed in the essay.

Intended as a chapter in a forthcoming essay collection marking the 70th anniversary of the Tokyo Trial judgment, this draft manuscript forms part of the Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Paper Series at SSRN. It may be found in numerous SSRN sites, including the International, Transnational and Comparative Criminal Law eJournal, of which I am the Editor-in-Chief. I was honored to have presented it during last November’s American Society of International Law Midyear Meeting Research Forum at UCLA Law.

Here’s the abstract:

Compared to its Nuremberg counterpart, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has scarcely been visible in the seven decades since both tribunals’ inception. Recently the situation has changed, as publications of IMTFE documents have occurred alongside divers legal and historical writings, as well as two films and a miniseries. These new accounts give new visibility to the Tokyo Trial – or at least to the roles that men played at those trials. This essay identifies several of the women at Tokyo and explores roles they played there, with emphasis on lawyers and analysts for the prosecution and the defense. As was the case with my 2010 essay, “Portraits of Women at Nuremberg,” the discussion is preliminary, offering glimpses of the Tokyo women in an effort to encourage further research.

The full manuscript may be downloaded here.

Elaine B. Fischel with Tokyo defense counsel, 12 September 1946 (credit)

(cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann blog)

Immigration, guest worker law, IntLawGrrls blog featured in new issue of Center’s SSRN research series

The latest edition of our Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Paper Series is now available at the Legal Scholarship Network of SSRN, the Social Science Research Network.

The series is a joint project of two University of Georgia School of Law units: our Center, plus our law school’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library. Series Editor-in-Chief is Thomas Striepe, the library’s Associate Director for Research Services.

To be found in this edition, Vol. 4 No. 2 of the series:

► Abstracts of two articles by Georgia Law Professor Jason A. Cade, an expert on immigration law:

► The other two abstracts arise out of the March 2017 conference held here at Georgia Law to commemorate the 1st decade of IntLawGrrls, a still-thriving blog that Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, our Center’s Faculty Co-Director, founded in March 2007:

These and all papers in our Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Series may be found here.

Register now for inaugural Women’s Leadership in Academia Conference, to be held July 19-20 at Georgia Law

Women law professors, librarians, and clinicians in, or interested in, leadership positions are invited to take part in the inaugural Women’s Leadership in Academia Conference, to be held July 19-20, 2018, here the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, about 65 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Keynote speakers will be Kellye Testy, former Dean of the University of Washington School of Law, who serves as President and CEO of the Law School Admission Council (LSAC is a conference sponsor), and Professor Libby V. Morris, Director of the Institute of Higher Education and Zell B. Miller Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, as well as a former interim provost, at the University of Georgia.

Session speakers will include Hari M. Osofsky, Dean at Penn State Law; Sonja West and Emma Hetherington, Georgia Law; RonNell Anderson Jones, Utah Law; Dahlia Lithwick, Slate; Mary-Rose Papandrea, North Carolina Law; Lisa Radtke Bliss,  Andrea A. Curcio, and Jessica Gabel Cino, Georgia State Law; Raye Rawls, University of Georgia J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development; Claire Robinson May, Cleveland State Law; KerryAnn O’Meara, University of Maryland College of Education;  Tim McFeeley, Isaacson, Miller; Lucy A. Leske, Witt/Kieffer; Laura Rosenbury, Dean at Florida Law; Hillary Sale, Washington University-St. Louis Law; and Melanie Wilson, Paula Schaefer, and Joy Radice,  Tennessee Law.

The conference will focus “on building skills and providing tools and information that are directly applicable to women in legal education looking to be leaders within the academy.” As detailed in the full conference program, session topics will include:

  • #MeToo and the Legal Academy
  • Exploring the Value of Female Mentoring Relationships to Cultivate Law School Leadership
  • Strategies for Conflict Management and Dialogue
  • Engendering Equality Within Your Institution: Establishing a Women’s Committee to Achieve Meaningful Change
  • Addressing Gender Disparities in Institutional Service Workloads
  • Academic Search Process Panel
  • Negotiation Strategies
  • Leadership Challenges and Solutions over the Course of a Career
  • Deans Panel

For registration and other details, see here. And act now: the hotel bloc will close in a few days.

Georgia Law Professor Amann presents “A New History of the Nuremberg Trials” at Oxford University’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights

We’re pleased today to cross-post this report from Professor Diane Marie Amann, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director here at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, who undertook research-intensive semester this spring:

OXFORD – A capstone of my Hilary-Trinity Term visit here took place yesterday, when I presented “A New History of the Nuremberg Trials: Figuring Women and Others into the Narrative” to law students and faculty who gathered at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, located at Oxford University’s Mansfield College. The Oxford Transitional Justice Research network cosponsored.

Professor Kate O’Regan, director of the institute and a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, opened my Research Visitor Seminar. Then came my  presentation of my research on the roles women played at Nuremberg – not only the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, but also the 12 subsequent American trials before what are known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Next, Dapo Akande, Professor of Public International Law at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, offered discussant’s remarks before opening the floor for a stimulating round of Q&A.

I’m grateful to all at the Institute for this event and the hospitality I’ve enjoyed during my stay at a Bonavero Research Visitor and Mansfield College Visiting Fellow. Grateful, too, for the opportunities I’ve had to present this work elsewhere in Europe, at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland Galway, University of Stockholm, University of Göttingen, and Max Planck Institute Luxembourg.

Jane Addams and Belva Ann Lockwood, et al., the newest members of ASIL

A warm welcoming of new members highlighted the recent annual meeting of the American Society of International Law.

Those welcomed included two luminaries – a Nobel Peace Prizewinner and a U.S. Presidential candidate – plus untold others, as reflected in this resolution, adopted by ASIL’s General Assembly:

RESOLVED,

That the American Society of International Law, wishing to provide recognition and posthumous redress to women who were excluded from membership in the Society during its early years, hereby confers membership on JANE ADDAMS, BELVA ANN LOCKWOOD, and any other women whose applications for membership were denied from 1906-1921.

FURTHER RESOLVED,

That the Society should undertake additional research to determine which members of other groups also were excluded from membership over the course of the Society’s history, and merit similar redress.

ASIL President Lucinda A. Low (left) introduced the resolutions, one of her last acts before handing the presidency to Professor Sean D. Murphy. Low, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, acted in response to a member inquiry – an inquiry prompted, as Low told ASIL members, by “International Law and the Future of Peace,” the speech I gave upon receiving the 2013 Prominent Woman in International Law award of ASIL’s Women in International Law Interest Group. As I indicated in that speech, original credit is owed to yet another ASIL President: Professor Alona Evans (below left), the 1st woman elected to lead the Society, in 1980, her tenure cut short by her death at age 63 that same year.

Six years earlier, Evans and Carol Per Lee Plumb had published “Women and the American Society of International Law” in the American Journal of International Law. They reported that ASIL, founded in 1906, had refused women’s applications for membership until 1921, the year after the U.S. Constitution was amended to give women the right to vote. Applicants before that time included:

► Lockwood (1830-1917) (top, middle), an attorney-activist who gained admittance to the District of Columbia bar in 1873 thanks to the intervention of U.S. President Ulysses Grant. Thereafter, she became the 1st woman to appear on an official ballot as a candidate for U.S. President, and also the 1st to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

► Addams (1860-1935) (top, right), the Chicago settlement house leader whose achievements including chairing the 1915 International Congress of Women at The Hague and serving and the 1st President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She would earn the Peace Prize in 1931.

According to Evans’ co-authored article, when Addams sought ASIL membership, she was sent a letter in which she was “invited, instead, to subscribe to the Journal ‘for the same amount as the annual dues ….’” That letter constitutes one of the few remaining records of such applications; it is for this reason that the 2018 Resolution refers to all women, known and unknown, who were denied membership.

Similarly lacking is evidence of how members of other groups fared in ASIL. (The sole African-American person elected ASIL President, C. Clyde Ferguson Jr., served just before Evans.) The Society has further resolved to seek this information and grant redress.

As for Evans, President Low indicated that the Society is considering how best to honor her legacy. These resolutions surely constitute a superb 1st step.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann)

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, thanks to archives preserving histories of post-WWII war crimes trials: Amann


LOS ANGELES – On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am honored to be spending this month at the USC Shoah Foundation, reviewing testimonies of persons who did their part to set right one of history’s terrible wrongs.

Seventy-three years ago today, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp located about 45 miles west of Kraków, Poland. Liberations of other camps by other Allied forces soon followed; among them, the U.S. liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen 4 days later.

Sixty years later, a 2005 U.N. General Assembly resolution set this date aside for commemoration of World War II atrocities; to quote the resolution, of

“… the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities …”

The resolution further:

  • honored “the courage and dedication shown by the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps”;
  • rejected “any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event”;
  • envisaged the Holocaust as “a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice”;
  • denounced “all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur”; and
  • encouraged initiatives designed to “inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.”

Among the many such initiatives are memorial centers and foundations throughout the world – 2 of which have helped me in my own research into the roles that women played during postwar international criminal trials at Nuremberg.

In December, the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, located in Glen Cove, New York, opened its archives to me. Special thanks to Helen  Turner, archivist and Director of Youth Education, for her assistance.

This month, as the inaugural Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow, I am in residence at the University of Southern California, examining documents in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. It has been a fruitful and moving scholarly experience, and I look forward to sharing my research at a public lecture on campus at 4 p.m. this Tuesday, Jan. 30 (as I was honored to do last week at UCLA Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights; video here). Special thanks to all at the foundation’s Center for Advanced Research – Wolf Gruner, Martha Stroud, Badema Pitic, Isabella Evalynn Lloyd-Damnjanovic, and Marika Stanford-Moore – and to the donors who endowed the research fellowship. (Fellowship info here.)

As reflected in the 2005 General Assembly resolution, the work of such institutions helps to entrench – and to prevent backsliding from – states’ promises to ensure and respect human rights and dignity norms, set out in instruments like the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. To this list I would add the many documents establishing international criminal fora to prosecute persons charge with violating such norms – from  the Nuremberg-era tribunals through to today’s International Criminal Court.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann; image credit)

Provost Pamela Whitten to speak at Georgia Law event on women’s leadership at AALS annual meeting

Law professors, librarians, and clinicians “interested in advancing women into leadership positions within the academy” are invited to take part in a special University of Georgia School of Law reception at next week’s annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.

As described in the AALS program, the event will be held January 5, 2018 from 5:30-7:00 pm at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, Level 4, America’s Cup CD, San Diego, California.

University of Georgia Provost Pamela Whitten (left) will give a presentation at the reception, which will also feature breakout discussions led by Kristi L. Bowman (right), Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at Michigan State University College of Law, and Usha R. Rodrigues (below right), Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the University of Georgia School of Law.

o-sponsoring are the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education and the AALS Section Associate Deans for Academic Affairs and Research.

Kudos to my colleague Usha, the principal organizer of this event. It’s a followup to the Roundtable Discussion on Women’s Leadership in Legal Academia that Georgia Law hosted at last year’s AALS one of many Georgia Women in Law Lead (Georgia WILL) events last academic year. As Usha explains in her invitation:

“This event will kick off programming for a new Women in Academic Leadership Initiative. In conjunction with the law schools of Brigham Young University, Michigan State University, UCLA, University of Tennessee, University of Virginia, and Yale University, we are spearheading a program that will feature regional leadership conferences aimed at preparing women in legal education for leadership opportunities and advancement.

“This initiative is in response to valuable feedback from the Roundtable Discussion on Women’s Leadership in Legal Academia we held during last year’s AALS Annual Meeting. Our colleagues expressed a need for a sustained project to foster women’s leadership. Based on that feedback, we have been developing a conference to address needs such as negotiation skills, conflict management, and effective communication. We are also creating panels to discuss various leadership roles and the competitive search process. The inaugural conference, to be held at the University of Georgia on July 19-20, 2018 …”

Details here and here.

GEO student Zack Lindsey publishes in Global Atlanta

geo2University of Georgia School of Law second-year student Zack Lindsey published an article in Global Atlanta about his experience this summer working in Ghana.

Ghana

During his Global Externship Overseas, or GEO,  Zack spent approximately two months in Accra working with Women in Law and Development in Africa. His work focused on the implementation of the Ghanaian Domestic Violence Act of 2007; he was responsible for helping set up a volunteer court watch program, training volunteers on the law, and conducting court surveys. He describes this work as “a key issue for Ghana” because of high rates of spousal abuse, but low rates of conviction under the Act.

global atlantaZack is one of twenty Georgia Law students who participated in the GEO initiative this summer. His article in Global Atlanta, a partner organization of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, draws parallels between the challenges facing victims of domestic violence seeking redress in Ghana to Georgia.

Associate Dean Amann named Spring 2018 Research Visitor and Visiting Fellow at University of Oxford, England

The University of Oxford, England, will host Georgia Law Associate Dean Diane Marie Amann during her research-intensive Spring 2018 semester. In the Hilary and Trinity Terms – March through June – she will be a Research Visitor at Oxford’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights hosted by the Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at its Mansfield College, where the Institute is based.

Amann joined the University of Georgia School of Law faculty in 2011, taking up the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law. She also has served, since 2015, as the law school’s Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives.

While at Oxford, Amann (right) plans to continue her research on “Women at Nuremberg,” which explores the many roles women played in post-World War II international criminal trials in Europe, as prosecutors, defense counsel, journalists, witnesses, staffers, and defendants.

As a Research Visitor, she also will have the opportunity to take part in Bonavero Institute activities, and will benefit from Oxford’s libraries, seminars and lectures, and other offerings.

The Bonavero Institute was founded in 2016 as a unit of the Oxford Faculty of Law, under the direction of Professor Kate O’Regan, a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Construction of the institute building, located at Mansfield College, is expected to be completed in early autumn.

Amann’s research visit in England will follow a January 2018 stint as the inaugural Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles.