folo

This post combines two international perspectives.

First: The ID at the end of an article in today’s Irish Times (h/t . . . and your little dog too) reads “Christine Bell is professor of international law and co-director of the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster. Tonight in Dublin, she will deliver the fourth annual Seán Lester Lecture, on the law of peace, at 7.30pm in the Green Hall of the Law Society of Ireland in Blackhall Place, Dublin 7. Admission: €15 (advance online purchase €10).”

Prof. Bell writes:

… The year 1989 to 1990 seemed a remarkable one. I had gone to Harvard funded by the same Harkness Scholarship that had first taken Alistair Cooke to the US. I was to study the civil rights movement, American constitutional law and theories of justice.

But the year became more significant for the events that unfolded around me, both in Harvard Law School and globally. In the spring term, Harvard Law School erupted in protests for greater diversity of the law faculty staff – most were white men – in an ongoing equality battle.

Staff and students together attended rallies and protests demanding more minority and women tenured faculty, and African professor Derek Bell, who supervised my dissertation, left Harvard at the end of the year in protest at the lack of change.

Globally, the world radically changed: Mandela was released, the Berlin wall came down, and the Cold War ended. But the American economy and big financial institutions had also collapsed (deregulation being accused), and would-be lawyers wondered about their future jobs and how they would pay off huge student loans. …

But more specifically her topic is the fellow who sat next to her in Lawrence Tribe’s US Con Law class. The fellow’s name was Barack Obama, and to say she remembers him vividly is to understate.

Second: The same impetus that produced Christine Bell’s reminiscence prompts this “world music” tribute from Fula Flute (now of New York City but originally from Guinea).

(h/t Mme Jobarteh)