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Why Fighting Structural Inequalities Requires Institutionalizing Difference: A Response to Nienke Grossman
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- Neus Torbisco-Casals
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- Journal:
- AJIL Unbound / Volume 110 / 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 January 2017, pp. 92-97
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People ask me sometimes, when—when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme CourtNienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches. As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. On the contrary, in the absence of special requirements in courts’ statutes or judicial selection procedures, the percentage of women judges has actually stagnated or even declined in some cases. Such acute sex imbalance cannot be attributed to the (contingent) fact that not enough qualified women are available for such highly prestigious positions. Grossman persuasively contests the plausibility of this widespread assumption. Not only is the limited-pool argument fallacious, but, as her analysis suggests, part of the problem might actually be that judicial selection procedures lack transparency and are not driven by merit. Instead, nominations of international judges are often used “to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas”; this practice seriously impinges on the chances of women to be appointed as international judges, as politics (both domestic and international) remains very much a male-dominated sphere.
Interview with Iris Marion Young
- Neus Torbisco Casals, Idil Boran
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Originally, the idea of interviewing Iris Marion Young in Barcelona came about after she accepted an invitation to give a public lecture at the Law School of Pompeu Fabra University in May 2002. I had first met Iris back in 1999, at a conference in Bristol, England, and I was impressed deeply by her personality and ideas. We kept in touch since then and exchanged papers and ideas. She was very keen to come to Spain (it seems that her mother had lived some years in Mallorca) and she finally travelled to Barcelona with her husband and daughter in spring 2002.
The lecture, which she entitled “Women, War, and Peace,” was meant to be the closing session of a course on Gender and the Law, and was also part of a series of seminars annually organized by the legal philosophy department (the Albert Calsamiglia Seminar). Her work was quite well-known among several Catalan philosophers and political scientists and professor Angel Castiñeira—who, at the time, was the director of Idees (Ideas), a Catalan journal published by the Centre d'Estudis de Temes Contemporanis (Center for the Study of Contemporary Issues)—suggested that she could give a second lecture, which they would publish together with an interview I could prepare. She accepted both proposals, and I started to think of a questionnaire for the interview while I was at Queen's University in Canada earlier that year. Idil Boran, a philosopher and good friend who did her doctorate at Queen's, offered to help me with this endeavour, since she also admired Iris as both a scholar and a person. Together we prepared the questions and sent them to her once she was back in Chicago, as there was not time to conduct the interview in person while she was in Barcelona.
In fall 2002, she sent some answers to our questions, but the document was unfortunately incomplete. She was busy at the time, so we didn't want to pressure her to finish the interview. Eventually, the editors of Idees decided to publish the manifest about the war in Iraq subscribed by a large number of American Intellectuals together with fragments of Iris's (antiwar) lectures and an article that she wrote together with Daniel Archibugi, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law.”1 The interview was thus left unpublished. Both Idil and I thought it would be worthwhile to publish it somewhere else, but, for one reason or another, Iris didn't have the time to complete it and we kept postponing the project. At some point, she said that the questions she left unanswered were too complex or challenging to give a short or quick answer, and that she would need to reflect on them to provide detailed responses.
Later, we learned she was ill and we didn't feel it was right to insist on those questions being answered. The issue came up again when she accepted to participate as a keynote speaker at the World Congress of Legal Philosophy held in Granada in June 2005. She then said she would come first to Barcelona (where she and Nancy Fraser had been invited to a workshop by the Catalan Women Institute) and suggested we could sit in a cafe and talk about the issues left out in those unanswered questions. Unfortunately, she had to cancel this trip because of her medical treatment, and I did not have the privilege of sharing time with her again. The following series of questions and responses are the product of this rather extended interview process.
Neus Torbisco Casals