Martha Minow, new Harvard Law Dean

Heartfelt congratulations to our colleague Martha Minow, just named the new Dean of Harvard Law School.
She is, as is evident from prior IntLawGrrls posts, the newest addition to the IntLawDean ranks.

Harvard's official announcement rightly describes Martha (right), the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law, as

a distinguished legal scholar with interests that range from international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities.

(photo credit)

Her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998) remains a landmark in the literature of transitional justice. Published just years after the end of the Cold War and the beginning of international human rights enforcement, it's a brilliant study of truth commissions, war crimes trials, and reparations bids in contexts as varied as Latin America and South Africa, Nuremberg and Bosnia. It's been followed by other books also invaluable to to all who care about human rights in this new century, among them the just-published Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (2009), co-authored with her Harvard colleague Jody Freeman.

A member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Martha has played a lead role in “Imagine Coexistence,” a project of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees that works for peaceful coexistence after violent ethnic conflict.

She is also a strong proponent of "Bringing Human Rights Home," not coincidentally the subject of a 2008 Harvard Human Rights Journal symposium in which IntLawGrrl Stephanie Farrior and I had the honor of taking part with her. She's co-directed studies of U.S. responses to recent immigrants, and of public school access for disabled children, and has served on many human rights-related boards.

Martha joined Harvard's law faculty in 1981 after having served as a law clerk to Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan,a master’s in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a law degree from Yale.

As Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said of Martha in announcing the appointment:

'She’s a scholar of remarkable intelligence, imagination, and scope, with a passion for legal education and a deep sense of how the law can serve essential public purposes.'

Read On! Civilians and war casualties

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing we're reading)


Hugo Slim, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness, and Morality in War (Columbia University Press, 2008), is a fascinating and far-ranging study of civilian suffering during war. The publisher's description explains:

... Slim analyzes the anti-civilian ideologies that encourage and perpetuate suffering and exposes the exploitation of moral ambiguity that is used to sanction extreme hostility. At what point does killing civilians become part of winning a war? Why are some methods of killing used while others are avoided?
Bolstering his claims with hard fact, Slim argues that civilian casualties are not only morally reprehensible but also bad military science. His book is a clarion call for action and a passionate defense of civil immunity, a concept that is more urgent and necessary today than ever before.

Much like Drew Faust's recent book on the dead of the Civil War, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008) -- about which IntLawGrrls posted here -- Slim's book (if less elegantly, with the fervor of a humanitarian activist rather than the authority of a master historian) helps to strip away the veneer of civility that we routinely impose on the brutality of modern warfare.

Slim identifies common military strategies as blatantly "anti-civilian" and suggests (hopefully) that "pro-civilian thinking and behavior" (7) can alter the violent balance of war and shift conflict toward the protection of civilians. He writes:

Above all, this is a book about intention and suffering, identity and ambiguity, tolerance and compassion.

(7) He seeks to complicate our understanding not simply of "citizen" or "soldier" but of "civilian" itself. (8)

Slim's effort to sort out the essence and liabilities of the "civilian" label is especially intriguing. He points out that civilians are often regarded with suspicion and as lacking integrity by soldiers, and that the sacrificial rhetoric of war accepts, and even promotes, not only military but also civilian casualties as a necessary prerequisite to positive change. Death and suffering can become their own justification in the face of a need to give meaning to tremendous and otherwise inexplicable loss. It is a reckoning that Faust finds in the mourning for and celebration of the Civil War dead: her preface is entitled "The Work of Death." She writes that the 1895 Memorial Day speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who later would serve 30 years as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice,

became emblematic of the elegiac view of the war that hailed death as an end in itself.

(Suffering, 270)

For a military historian's perspective on Slim's volume and other aspects of war, past and present, see the blog of Mark Grimsley, the Ohio State historian who is now the Harold K. Johnson Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College.

(Cross-posted at Legal History Blog)

The write women

Monday morning tip:
The weekly go-to site for a roundup of interesting books reviewed in Sunday's papers is Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog. Featured there this past week, 2 new books by women scholars now on our gotta-read list:
► Melissa Nobles (right), The Politics of Official Apologies, a comparative study of the utility, or not, of apologies for state misconduct, in United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Links to review here.
► Samantha Power (left), Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the U.N. diplomat and former High Commissioner for Human Right skilled in the suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq. Links to reviews here.
Also of note:
Last week's Washington Post profile of historian and newly installed Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust (right), an interview prompted by the recent release of her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.