Guest Bloggers: Michele Bratcher Goodwin & Patricia Y. Jones

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Michele Bratcher Goodwin (right) and Dr. Patricia Y. Jones (left) as guest bloggers. Beginning today, they contribute an interdisciplinary conversation (here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on intercountry adoptions.
► Michele, the Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota, holds joint appointments at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her courses include Biotechnology Law, Genetic Property and the Law, Health Law Policy, Health Law Regulations, Law and Education, Legal Ethics, Mental Health Law, and Torts. She is a leading voice in the debates on socioeconomics and race in medicine, having founded the country's 1st center for studying race and bioethics.
Michele's served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and was honored with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Griffith University in Australia. Prior to law teaching Michele -- who earned her J.D. degree at Boston College Law school and holds B.A. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Wisconsin -- was a Gilder-Lehrman postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.
Notable among Michele's many publications is her scholarship on organ transplant policy. Urging a broader reconciliation of the legal treatments of women with differing social statuses, she's helped redefine evaluation of reproductive technology policy. In addition to the forthcoming book Biotechnology and Bioethics, she's the author of Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Human Body Parts (2006), published in Portuguese translation in 2008. The new collection she edited, Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010) (right), contains essays by Michele and others, among them IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn, guest/alumna Michelle Olbermann, and my California-Davis colleague Lisa C. Ikemoto. Michele also co-edited Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body (2009).
Among her many professional achievements, Michele is the former Secretary General of the International Academy of Law & Mental Health and Past Chair of the Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care of the American Association of Law Schools. She's received the Black Pearl Award and the Chicago History Museum’s Pioneering Women Award, and been commissioned a Kentucky Colonel.
► Patricia, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Chicago, has over twenty five years of experience as a clinician and administrator of mental health programs. She's a member of the Steering Committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
Her vocational experience encompasses an array of clinical settings: public and private, profit and not-for-profit, and academic institutions. Consistent is her focus on access to and development of appropriate mental health care for children and their families. She has specific interests in applied psychological practice with culturally diverse populations, in interpersonal violence with concomitant post-traumatic stress disorders, and in child abuse. Patricia provides consultation and/or clinical supervision to administrative and program staff who serve a diverse population within a wide variety of social service organizations; especially, to Child Protective Services across the United States.

Patricia earned her B.S. degree in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Heartfelt welcome!

On December 18

On this day in ...
... 1979 (30 years ago today), at U.N. headquarters in New York, by a vote of 130-0-10, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women at U.N. headquarters in New York City. The next summer, in Copenhagen, Denmark, 64 states signed and 2 ratified the Convention. On September 3, 1981, it entered into force, "faster than any previous human rights convention had done." It has 186 states parties, Qatar having joined in April "without any reservations." This, alas, has been less than common in the case of CEDAW, as this article indicates -- though Morocco withdrew its reservations last December. As for the United States, a nonparty state, a March 2009 Nation article by Betsy Reed framed the then-soon-expected debate on U.S. ratification of the Women's Convention:

Will the Obama administration, and Senate Democrats, bow to pressure from antiabortion Republicans and include ... conditions in this year's version, in a bid to ensure passage? Or will they push for a 'clean CEDAW,' as many feminists are urging? Senator Barbara Boxer, who heads the relevant Foreign Relations subcommittee, has pledged to begin hearings with a clean version of the treaty,
but pressure will quickly mount to muck it up.

(credit for Lisa Bennett photo of 2000 pro-CEDAW demonstration in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Organization for Women) Classes having ended for the semester, we at the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law, will be marking the anniversary with a noon-hour event on Thursday, January 28: "The Women's Convention at 30." Featured will be Krishanti Dharmaraj (right) -- who successfully persuaded the Board of Supervisors to make San Francisco the 1st "city in the United States to pass legislation implementing an international human rights treaty," CEDAW -- as well as members of our CILC Faculty Council, like Afra Afsharipour, Lisa Ikemoto, IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Lisa R. Pruitt, and Madhavi Sunder.

(Prior December 18 posts are here and here.)