If you would like to escape the confining mindset of COVID alienation and isolation, I recommend signing up as a crew for a leg of the Ocean Expedition currently conducted by the Norwegian Tall Ship, Statsråd Lehmkuhl. This ship will travel around the world for two years. The ocean is unbelievably vast and the sky is filled with thousands of stars. Both the moon and the sun have a special brilliance in the sky at sea, especially the sunset. One day we saw both the sun and the moon at the same time. Dolphins like to lead the ship and birds like to follow. As crew you will be expected to learn how to steer the ship, climb rigging up to the masts and the bow, pack sails, raise and lower sails, watch out for small boats and buoys, look out for man overboard, learn to tie knots, and inspect for fire. You will have to sleep in a hammock (earplugs provided). I traveled from Norway to Spain and was very moved by the precious impact of being surrounded by ocean for an extended period of time. There was a little brown bird who was a stow away, he ruffled his feathers in response to the sea breezes while sitting on a rope on the outside of the ship. I sincerely hope that he disembarked in Spain before the ship leaves for the Trans-Atlantic leg of the journey. When we saw evidence of humanity, it came in the form of off-shore oil rigs, wind farms, and a nuclear power plant on the shore of the UK. We also experienced a close inspection of our sails (we had 19 up at the time) by a bi-plane and a helicopter and seemed to have sailed through a military exercise comprised of 3-5 submarines, one surveillance ship with no windows, and jet fighters that we could hear but not see in the sky above. The fellow crew members came from all over the world and represent all age groups, from an 18 year old German young women travelling with her father to a 70 year old former paratrooper who scampered up the rigging with great finesse. The professional crew was composed of several Danish women (including Signe Maersk) who exhibited superhero strength in drawing in sails and climbing to the top of the masts. The women stated that there were few women who were appointed as captains, challenges include the need for child care while away at sea and stereotypes regarding capabilities. I recommend reading the excellent collection of essays in Gender and Law of the Sea. It is memorable experience which serves to confirm the joy of committing to recognition of the special relationship between human beings and nature.

► The International Crimes Database, powered by the Asser Institute, has announced a call for submissions of short articles for publication in the online paper series “ICD Briefs”, which provides in-depth information and insights through short articles on international crimes and international criminal jurisprudence. The theme of the paper is “Ecocide as an International Crime? Perspective from Domestic and International Law”. For more information, please visit here or the Asser Institute website.

Interested authors should send an abstract (300 words) and a brief biography (100 words) to [email protected] by 1 October 2021. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by the ICD editorial team via e-mail by 15 October 2021 and will be subsequently invited to submit their full ICD Briefs by 1 January 2022.

The Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights with Routledge/Taylor & Francis recently published an edited volume entitled Public Health, Mental Health, and Mass Atrocity Prevention. ​​​IntlLawGrrls Editor Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum is a co-editor of this book along with Caitlin Mahoney, Amy Meade, and Arlan Fuller.

The first multidisciplinary volume of its kind, this book is the product of two years of close collaboration to consider the various ways in which international human rights and rights-based approaches can promote public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity crimes—including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In June 2019, the editors convened academics and practitioners engaged in work at the intersections of these disciplines across various contexts and at various intervention points along the continuum of harms that can be defined as identity-based violence and/or atrocity crimes. Represented among these scholars and practitioners were psychologists, sociologists, social psychologists, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, political scientists, legal scholars, human rights practitioners, anthropologists, historians, peace studies scholars, and philosophers. All participants recognized that multidisciplinary tools and frames were critical to their work in their respective disciplines to identify effective strategies to disrupt causal pathways of identity-based violence, human rights abuses, and mass atrocity crimes.
 
One result of this work is this edited volume, where the authors of each chapter dive deeply into the public health and mental health rights dilemmas that emerge from prevention efforts related to identity-based violence and mass atrocity crimes. In this book, the authors examine the ways they can adapt rights and health frameworks, methods, research, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. In its totality, the book demonstrates the current state of these various fields and the intersecting themes within human rights, public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and, importantly, future potential directions for next steps.

The other product of this convening was a special issue published by the Harvard Health and Human Rights Journal that complements this edited volume. The special issue is free and open access to all online.

The T.M.C. Asser Institute is a research center for International and European law in the Hague. Its mission is to contribute to the development of International and European law by conducting independent fundamental research, policy-oriented research, and applied legal research. It is a leading and authoritative provider of postgraduate and executive education on International and European law.

T.M.C. Asser Institute is seeking a senior communications and marketing specialist with a general background in (online) communications, preferably in an academic environment.

For more information on this vacancy, click here. The deadline is September 15, 2021.

Given the unprecedented recent challenges—to every aspect of living, working, teaching—we hope Mallika Kaur’s new article in the Journal of Law and Social Policy will be of special interest and benefit to all colleagues who teach and/or engage with law students and the next generation of lawyers. 

Maybe more than ever, COVID has laid bare that  the private-public binary was always largely a façade. To do a good job publicly (whether in classrooms, boardrooms, courtrooms), we need to also put in work privately. Thus this article encourages knowing and managing our own reactions, privileges, biases, emotions, and traumas. Professors (and supervisors and managers) are themselves hardly immune from personal emotional reactions.

“The struggles of meaningfully engaging trauma are as old as the legal profession. So far, we have largely idealized lawyers who seem to make these struggles seamlessly invisible. Our students may be pushing us to create classrooms and a world where making struggles more visible is the norm, for the benefit of all.” (p. 119)

A human rights advocate focused on gendered violence work, about seven years ago Mallika began proposing that lawyering in fact involves “negotiating trauma,” with several players and their corresponding emotional interplays.  

She continues providing consultation and training to lawyers (nonprofit, public, private) as well as those who train, supervise, and teach lawyers about the importance of naming, preparing for and even embracing the emotions and traumas we confront in our professional lives, inseparable from our personal lives.

She has developed and taught “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions and the Practice of Law” at  UC Berkeley School of Law, California. The article benefitted from the insights of many smart and compassionate colleagues and students.

“There is no one type of class or subject matter for which professors must consider the various emotional interplays. Yet, even “trigger warnings” (triggering plenty of debates in academia) or “content notices” are generally reserved for classes such as the one session devoted to discussing sex crimes in Criminal Law. 

This is little help to the student who was the victim of a carjacking. Or the student who has had multiple miscarriages. Or the student whose family members are political prisoners. Or the student whose grandparents were ejected from their own homes during an armed conflict. Or the student who is surviving intimate partner violence at home. Or the student whose parent has survived torture abroad and is now reading Hamdan v Rumsfeld at home in the US. Or the student who has been a victim of workplace sexual harassment and hears classmates chuckle at Clinton v Jones. Or the student whose California family lost everything in the Paradise fires, only to be evacuated again in the 2020 wildfires, while classrooms turned Zoom-only during a global pandemic. Or the student, as she had last year, whose father lost his business and livelihood to partners who had more savvy contract lawyers.” (p. 114)

The article is organized in three short sections:

1. THE PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGE [for those aspiring for trauma-aware and indeed trauma-centered teaching] IS NOT INSIGNIFICANT
2. BUT THIS PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGE IS NOT INSURMOUNTABLE
3. TRY ON [simple strategies]: A PROCESS NOT PRESCRIPTION

Note that while small seminars and large lecture classes have different cultures and pedagogies, the suggestions presented mostly require increased intentionality and planning, and not more classroom time.

English Abstract

HOW DO YOU NEGOTIATE TRAUMA AND EMOTIONS IN YOUR CLASSROOM? Posing this open-ended question to law professors not only begets more questions, but also often elicits a reflexive retort: law professors dare not present themselves as mental health experts and law schools have mental health resources for students having difficulties. The difficulty of this approach is that in 2021, most law students are no longer willing to accept that their legal education must suppress emotions, including trauma. For classrooms where professors may be less comfortable with emotional discussions, they may find themselves challenged and perhaps even feel obstructed from teaching their subject matter with the freedom and expertise it deserves. Are we simply dealing with an overly sensitive generation? Or are we being pushed to make overdue changes that will improve legal teaching, legal education, and eventually the profession? 

Citation Information

Kaur, Mallika. “Negotiating Trauma & Teaching Law.” Journal of Law and Social Policy 35. (2021): 113-119. 

The International Nuremberg Principles Academy is pleased to announce that registration for the Nuremberg Forum 2021 is now open. The forum will take place online on October 15 and 16.

The conference will examine the Nuremberg Principles today and reflect on the legal framework and systems established after WWII to tackle impunity, while critically analyzing whether this framework or system, or the fights against impunity in general, are living up to the Nuremberg Principles. The Forum will seek to understand what challenges, if any, persist in terms of strengthening the common fight against impunity and towards sustainable peace through justice.

The Forum poses 2 main questions: 1) What is the framework enforcing the fight against impunity; and 2) Has the fight against impunity been living up to the Nuremberg Principles?

For more information and to register for the event, click here.

The Hague Conference on Private International Law has been the proponent of numerous private international family law instruments since its founding in 1893.  For the last decade, its family law work focused primarily on three significant projects.  The first, to assemble a publication that provides guidance to judges, governments, attorneys, and practitioners in the application of Article 13(b) of the Hague Child Abduction Convention, concluded in early 2020.   The second involved findings of an Experts Group that has been exploring the cross-jurisdictional recognition and enforcement of agreements between parents in their disputes, specifically related to their children’s custody, relocation, child abduction, and child support.  The expectation is that this group will produce a publication by early 2022.  The third key project has been a long-standing discussion among experts on whether to propose a new treaty that addresses the issue of surrogacy and parentage for children in cross-border families.  Countries differ in their approaches to issues such as paternity establishment, assisted reproductive technologies, and surrogacy arrangements, with intended parents at times traveling to different countries to engage in processes to bear a child and then meeting the difficulty of repatriating that child to their home country and having their parentage recognized. 

With some of the Hague Conference’s seminal work product concluding in the coming year or two, it has the difficult, yet important, task of proposing new family law work, in line with its Member States’ direction. In late 2023, the Hague Conference will host its next Special Commission meeting for the exploration of work and discussions on the practical operation of the Hague Abduction Convention and the Hague Child Protection Convention. In preparation, the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference has already set forth a tentative agenda, presented to the Council on General Affairs and Policy at its annual meeting in March 2021.   To prepare for any Special Commission meeting, the Permanent Bureau circulates questionnaires to Member States and collects statistics to focus on the most relevant discussion topics. 

The Permanent Bureau has already begun pinpointing some focal points for discussion at its next Special Commission meeting.  Most importantly, the Special Commission meeting will include a discussion on the impact of the pandemic and court shutdowns, remote proceedings, and delays.  Child abduction cases were still routinely treated as “emergency” matters during the COVID-19 pandemic, and still addressed urgently, despite backlogs on court calendars. Nonetheless, there remain concerns about the impact of such a widespread international emergency on the safe movement of children across borders, and how the Hague Child Abduction weathered such an event.  Initially, lawyers were concerned that parents would use the pandemic to ignore existing obligations to return children to the other parent’s household.  When countries began closing international borders, and consulates stopped issuing visas for travel, matters became even more complicated.  In some countries, courts closed for a significant length of time, causing additional concern that when a parent retained a child overseas, there was no legal remedy available to the parent seeking the child’s return.  This topic will be vital to understanding how this 40+ year old treaty will function in an ever-changing world. 

Another topic of discussion included on the Hague Conference’s tentative agenda is the definition of “habitual residence” in the Hague Conference’s various treaties, specifically the Hague Child Abduction Convention.  In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Monasky v. Taglieri, 140 S.Ct. 719 (2020), finally gave clarity to this un-defined term by opening up pandora’s box with a “totality-of-the-circumstances” analysis.  Since the Supreme Court resolved the U.S. Circuit split on this key component of the Hague Abduction Convention, U.S. courts have been finding their footing in how to apply it to cases.  Some U.S. courts have continued to apply, or at least prioritize, the standard they previously used.  Other courts have distinguished Monasky, opining that it only applies when the parents have no agreement as to their child’s home. 

However, perhaps one of the more interesting issues on the Special Commission’s tentative agenda is hearing children’s voices in child abduction and child protection proceedings, including the appointment of lawyers to represent these children. The Hague Conference previously addressed this issue in Special Commission meetings, including the Sixth Special Commission in 2011, where it confirmed that there is no uniform approach to how a child’s views are taken into account, but that it is important to hear a child during proceedings. The tentative agenda for the Eighth Special Commission in 2023 is more specific, focusing not just on the child’s voice as it relates to a specific treaty, but giving that topic its own agenda item, and elaborating on it by having the Special Commission discuss the role of lawyers to represent children and afford them a voice.  Some countries consistently appoint lawyers to represent children to protect them and their voices and help minimize the negative impact of stressful litigation on the child.  Some countries simply have no ability to do that.  Others pick and choose when these lawyers will be provided or appointed.  There are no global standards, or even guidance on the role of these lawyers, and no training for these lawyers, either.  Given some recent literature on this issue, and some research done in a few European countries, this topic may present itself as one of the more prominently discussed in 2023.