A group of moms have brought city’s attention to the manner in which Facebook confirms to the otherwise sexist norms in our society when it comes to breastfeeding rights.

Although the protests took place at Facebook office lobby at 335, Madison Avenue, Facebook officials did not feel it necessary to address the gathering, or more importantly, the issue. Emma Kwasnica, the woman who launched this global movement against Facebook believes that the employees of this powerful corporation are “running rougue” and deleting images owing to their personal sensitivity. However the reality is, by turning indifferent to her protests, Facebook has been consistently adhering to the patriarchal standards. And there lies the greater crisis.

The online moral czars have flexibilities otherwise deemed illegal. For instance, in public, a women in New York has the right to breastfeed her baby in any public or private place where she has a right to be. This includes stores, day care centers, doctors’ offices, restaurants, parks, movie theaters and many other places. No one can tell her to leave any of these places because she is breastfeeding, and no one can tell her to breastfeed in a bathroom, a basement or a private room. Likewise, at work, the employer cannot discriminate against a woman for choosing to breastfeed her baby or for pumping milk at work.

Facebook and other social media which self-regulate for the most part, need to be not just politically correct, but more importantly, socially responsible by following women’s rights laws. Or stricter regulations need to be in place for private corporations, irrespective of whether they claim to be freedom loving virtual/social media networks.

Following news reporting by Cassandra Garrison for Metro details the protest, and its impact –

An international movement landed in NYC this morning as a small group of women carried their young children inside the building that houses Facebook’s NYC office, demanding that the social networking giant leave their breastfeeding photos alone.
The “nurse-in” was planned after Vancouver mom Emma Kwasnica launched an online campaign, calling on Facebook to stop deleting images of mothers nursing their children. Kwasnica said Facebook removed her photos numerous times, despite the company’s claim that it does not delete images unless they show an exposed breast that is not being used for feeding.
The group of moms who attended the NYC “nurse-in” insist that even though the photos are acceptable by Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, they are continually removed. They met in the lobby of 335 Madison Avenue, the building where Facebook operates on two floors. The small contingent was first asked to leave but later returned to the lobby where security allowed them to stay. The moms nursed their children and chanted lines like, “Facebook, Facebook, don’t be mean — breastfeeding is not obscene.”
“People view breasts as this sexual thing,” said Wendy Ledesma, an Astoria mom who has a 17-month-old son. “We need to get over that as a society and realize that breastfeeding is normal, natural, beautiful and important.”
No one from Facebook came downstairs to address the moms, but a spokesperson blamed the deleted photos on human error. Each photo that gets flagged as offensive is reviewed by an employee who then decides whether the photo will be deleted and the user’s account frozen.

Women’s Media Center’s exclusive:

The author, professor emerita of Penn State University, describes the culture that produced the recent scandal—and suggests a path to a needed focus on the victims of such abuse.

This book and its empathetic engagement will be a treasure to anyone working with victims of sexual abuse. And if we want to truly understand the failure in the Penn State scandal, we will look closely to its victims.

I was once summoned to my dean’s office to justify comments I made in a radio interview upon publication of my book Prostitution of Sexuality (1995). I had said that one in ten women in the United States is raped, and that figure—which has since doubled—was an undercount because only 10 percent of rapes are reported. The interview angered a Penn State alumni, who demanded that the university president take action against me. In all seriousness, the president forwarded the complaint to my dean, who expected me to explain myself. My answer didn’t satisfy apparently so I was called in once again. This time I told the administration that the call was likely coming from a sexual predator, and I walked out of the dean’s office.
Penn State caters to an alumni whose donations are a major source of income, and whose presence is a major segment of the crowd that fills the 100,000-plus capacity football stadium every home game. In such an atmosphere, coach Joe Paterno, as the lead draw for alumni contributions, was beyond question. So, for a time, was Rene Portland, the Penn State women’s basketball coach whose explicit “No Lesbians” team policy and attendant sexual harassment wreaked havoc on many young women’s lives and college careers. When Penn State, under pressure from feminist and lesbian/gay rights groups, mandated sexual harassment training for all coaches in the 1990s, Paterno and Portland, with the arrogance of the untouchable, showed up for only the last 15 minutes of the program.

More:

At Women’s Rights NY, we have awarded our Annual “Women of the Year” recognition to the following four exemplary feminists –

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the 24th and current President of Liberia won a decisive victory in the reelection of 2011. She has the distinction of being the first and currently the only elected female head of state in Africa.

She received the African Gender Award in 2011, and was the co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Ellen Sirleaf has in the past represented Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Pan-African anticolonial agency that supported, trained and provided weapons and military bases to colonized nations fighting for independence. It was thanks to OAU that South Africa during Apartheid was expelled from World Health Organization.

When Sirleaf was elected in 2005, she had promised to rule just one term, but she decided to contest again last year and continues to rule Liberia as its most illustrious of presidents. As the president, she has had enormous success in fronts of national debt relief. She has criticized international military interventions in Libya, and has led historical investigations into national civil conflicts in Liberia with an intent to identify the people associated with former warring factions.

However, not everything is rosy with Sirleaf’s growth and progress. She has been viewed as pro-western in many instances. Her opponents claim that the Nobel Prize was awarded to her a couple of months before the election so as to ensure her re-election. Her first foreign visit was meant to restore friendship with Côte d’Ivoire, a traditionally pro-capitalist member of the former OAU. Under pressure, she also agreed to withdraw her stance regarding Libya and joined the chorus in calling for Gaddafi’s head.

Notwithstanding controversies, being an African woman leader, she has been acknowledged by Newsweek magazine as one of the top ten best leaders of the world. Time magazine paid her tribute as one of the top ten female leaders.

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada died on May 9, 2011. She was Bolivia’s first female president and only the second female president in the entire western hemisphere (if at all Argentina’s Isabel Pero’s widow-card is accounted for).

Unlike any other female political leader in the Americas, Lidia Gueiler was fiercely revolutionary in her politics. She joined the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in 1948, the most important political party in the 20th Century Bolivia.

Lidia Gueiler’s contributions to feminist causes in Latin America are unparalleled. Three years after she joined the Revolutionary Left Movement, she became the most formidable social rights activist in Latin America when she led 26 women on an eight-day hunger strike to win the release of their sons and husbands, who were being held as communist political prisoners.

After the MNR was toppled from power in 1964, Gueiler spent many years in exile. She was elected president of the lower legislature in Bolivia upon her return. After a series of military interventions and nationwide labor strikes, Gueiler was appointed president of Bolivia by the Bolivian congress in 1979.

A lifetime campaigner of women’s rights and progressive causes, she publicly supported the socialist leader Evo Morales in 2005 election.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy turned 50 in 2011. But more than this incidental turn of event for her, there was a more conscious decision taken by the Booker Prize winning progressive writer. She declared herself to be “a Maoist sympathizer”. In an interview to The Guardian, she endorsed any means possible to bring about revolutionary changes.

Guerrillas use violence directed against the state forces and at times innocent civilians sustain injuries and deaths. When Roy was asked to clarify if she condemned such violence, she was forthright: “I don’t condemn it any more. If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Betty Ford

Betty Ford

Betty Ford died on July 8, 2011. She was more than a First Lady. Through her contributions to women’s rights movements, she set precedents as a First Lady unafraid of taking on politically sensitive issues.

Betty Ford raised awareness about breast cancer following her mastectomy in 1974. She also drew from her personal experiences to politicize issues when she raised awareness of addiction following her battle with alcoholism.

As a pioneering feminist of her time, she actively supported Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), equal pay, and women’s right to abortion. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Betty Ford to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. She opened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas where she helped create the National Plan of Action.

When in 1978, the deadline for ratification of the ERA was extended from 1979 to 1982 it resulted in a march of a hundred thousand people on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Several leading feminists including Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Chittick, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem joined Betty Ford in registering protest.

(The List: Edited by Saswat Pattanayak)

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize has been presented to three activists and political leaders on Saturday for “their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights” as peacemakers.

New York Times reports that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, 73; her compatriot Leymah Gbowee, 39, a social worker and a peace activist; and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist and a political activist who, at 32 (in the picture above), is the youngest Peace Prize laureate and the first Arab woman to receive the award.

Wall Street has been occupied by those representing the 99%. But what about the top 1%? How do they fare? They might be throwing cakes at the hungry masses down below, but how do they share their pies? They might be unleashing atrocities upon the huge majority of people through criminal manipulations, but how fairly do they treat each other?

A look at their annual salaries points to crucial factors of inequality and biases within the top 1% themselves. The masculine, patriarchal and sexist nature of corporate greed duly relegates its women accomplices to the inferior salary brackets. No matter if the women are in the same ranks of CEOs or Presidents, they are just paid way less. In fact, the highest paid woman Safra A. Catz (President, Oracle Corp.) earns less than any of the first 12 highest paid men! And the second highest paid woman Wellington J. Denahan-Norris (COO, Annaly Capital Management) earns less than any of the top 25 highest paid male executives.

The cumulative total earning for the first 9 months of last year was $381,105,205 for the highest paid male executives, while the cumulative total earning for the highest paid female executives for the said period was $118,233,692.

When such disparities in pay across genders have been normalized within the top echelon, it is no wonder the financial bosses of the Wall Street do not think twice about the increasing class society afflicting America today.

Here, then, is the breakdown (first 9-month period, 2010) -

Top 5 Men

Philippe P. Dauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $84,469,515

Mark V. Hurd
President
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $78,362,540

Lawrence J. Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $77,556,015

Ray R. Irani
Executive Chairman
Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY)
2010 Total Compensation: $76,107,010

Thomas E. Dooley
Chief Operating Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $64,610,125

Top 5 Women

1. Safra A. Catz
President and Chief Financial Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $42,095,887

2. Wellington J. Denahan-Norris
Vice Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Annaly Capital Management, Inc. (NLY)
2010 Total Compensation: $23,634,800

3. Carol Meyrowitz
Chief Executive Officer
TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)
2010 Total Compensation: $19,252,740

4. Susan M. Ivey
Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Reynolds American, Inc. (RAI)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,823,900

5. Marina Armstrong
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Gymboree Corp. (GYMB)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,426,365

Sources: Equilar & CNN Money.

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.

A Republican-led House Committee sent a letter to Planned Parenthood requesting twelve years of financial disclosures to determine if the organization is misusing federal funds, in particular for abortion services. The ranking Democrat on the Committee, Henry Waxman, called the investigation, “part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men.” With the economy headed for the Republican Great Depression II, as civil unrest rises about the high crimes perpetrated by Wall Street, as well as two unfunded, undeclared and endless wars, the GOP believe that taxpayers dollars are best used to destroy Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive health and rights.

Don’t these bastards have wives, daughters, mothers and sisters? To paraphrase Philip Roth, can people be so abysmally sociopathic and live?

Do you believe it?

Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes, and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves?

By Jack Tuckner, Esq

Voter ID laws hurt female voter interests, as well as the interests of the rest of us, and though the first time you hear Republicans explain that they’re only in favor of compulsory photo identification at the polls in order to stop voter fraud, it sounds reasonable, until you realize that’s just a transparent pretext for their real agenda, suppressing voter turnout in general to help their chances of winning. There’s absolutely zero evidence that voter fraud of the type that could be deterred by photo ID is a significant problem in the United States. A five-year effort by the Bush Justice Department “turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections,” according to reporting by the NY Times. They found no evidence of double voting or other types of fraud that an ID requirement would prevent. It’s all about suppressing the will of “we the people” (remember us?) by ensuring that vast numbers of ordinary citizens are disallowed from voting, whether by hook or by crook. Here’s how Paul Weyrich, the co founder of the Heritage Foundation­, Moral Majority, and other right-wing Republican groups explains the conservati­ve opinion on voting:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Republican politicians and the corporations and wealthy special interests groups and individual who pull their strings, want as keep as few African-Americans, women, Latinos, the young, the elderly, the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick from voting as they possibly can, as every vote counts equally, and it is rightly assumed that most of us who aren’t wealthy white men will vote for a candidate who cares about the general welfare of our country and the real persons who comprise the beating heart of our great country, not the corporate “persons” who pay to get rich Republicans to do its selfish bidding.

Voter ID laws place an unnecessary hardship on women, as those who are newly married or recently divorced may have name changes issues (unfortunately, U.S. women still change their names in 90 percent of marriages) and their passport or birth certificate may be in their former names, meaning that may be required to obtain a certified court document showing the divorce decree or marriage certificate. These documents vary in cost from state to state but can cost upwards of $25 plus any time off work needed to obtain them. For each additional burden placed on a voter the likelihood of voting diminishes.

You may need a driver’s license to drive a car or get on a plane, but those activities are privileges not rights. Voting for a candidate that represents our true interests should be an unfettered right; in fact it should be required in a true democracy. Nine decades after women won the right to vote, that right is under attack by big business and its enablers in government.

(Related Story from the Women’s Media Center)

By Jack Tuckner, Esq

In the New York Times today, Jennifer Preston writes about how some companies are subjecting job candidates to social media background check. This article is more bad news for employees in today’s job market. As it’s a clear seller’s market for corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash and who’ve now been declared “persons” by our corporation-happy US Supreme Court, and with more than 30 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed, how many job seekers can withstand the rigors of a “voluntary” background check into every aspect of their personal lives? This search is not actually voluntary, of course, because if you decline to allow it, you won’t be considered for the job, period.

If you’ve been out of work for any length of time, and missed a credit card payment or two, how will you withstand the credit check? And unless it’s a financial planning position, what does a missed credit card payment or two say about your ability to perform the essential functions of the job sought? Nothing. Where the internet’s concerned, applicants are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, as a complete absence of presence on the ‘net may make an employer suspicious of your long term anonymity and voicelessness, or, your prolific blog postings, Facebook and LinkedIn entries and photos may become fodder for deep examination and judgment by every employer seeking to analyze your “compatibility” for the job based on illegal factors. It’s a brave new world of utter transparency, and the power of the few and the mighty is engulfing the dwindling influence of the many and the meek.

Remember, as they indicate in the article, personal information that you can’t ask about in an interview are the same things you can’t research online, and that includes a wide range of information covering a person’s age, gender, religion, disability, national origin, race, color, ethnicity, pregnancy, and marital status and sexual orientation in many states such as NY. How can you keep an employer from discriminating against you based on these protected statuses, when they may be readily apparent from your online profile, photos and postings? And one has to prove that these illegal reasons formed the basis of the company’s rejection of your application, a feat that may be impossible without clear evidence. This is another reason why the future looks bleak for the American worker, so long as corporations and their enablers hold all the power, money and influence in our culture and government.

Unless we all mobilize and fight for more union representation and enhanced labor and worker rights, unless we fight for progressive representatives who’ll do the business of “we the people,” as they’re Constitutionally required to do, not the business of millionaires, billionares and corporations as they now do because of the corrupting influence of unrestrained money in politics, our freedom to follow our heart’s path in life will be severely restricted by the oligarchs at the helm of America’s economic ship.

Now that the case against D.S.K. seems to be falling apart, many in the media are pondering what the future holds for women’s rights in France. As an American living in Paris, I was curious to get to get the perspective of French women on this. In speaking with French friends and colleagues, every woman has a personal story about hostile work environments and harassment. It’s important to note, however, that not all companies where women work are hostile. As a young woman in France, you’re not guaranteed to come across harassment in every workplace; but, you are almost certain to experience it at some point in your career.

The most common form of harassment is described as “flirtation” here. Male bosses and colleagues will compliment women on their bodies, nag them for dates, etc. In general, men only say “positive” or complimentary things about women’s bodies at work. As one French consultant put it,

Even powerful women in France being interviewed about important policy matters are introduced as ‘the beautiful’ or ‘the charming’ . . . Unless you’re not pretty, then you don’t get anything.

The unwritten rule is women should be flattered and thankful for the attention. Of course, if your boss is harassing you for dates and telling you how great you look in those pants, feeling grateful probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. This type of unwanted flirtation at work is irritating, belittling, and can have long-term repercussions. In short, it’s harassment.

Women here generally feel like they’re under pressure to put it up with this kind of harassment. If they don’t, they’ll be ridiculed and stigmatized for “making a big deal” of it, and the harassing behavior will continue. What does this look like in practice? It can be a challenge for women to get respect. And when the culture of a company is permissive, it can lead to unacceptable and surprisingly adolescent behavior. For example, at one company men in the office would turn up the air-conditioning when an attractive woman wore a light blouse, in hopes they’d be better able to see her nipples. The woman who related this story, said she had complained about similar incidents in the past at that company and was repeatedly brushed off. So in this case, she felt there was nothing for her to do… except to turn off the air-conditioning in the future. Protests are, for the most part, quiet and understated. (Cf. Marche des salopes (“Slut Walk”)).

In recent months though, protests are getting louder. Where it was formally considered inappropriate or unwise for women to speak up, there is now mounting evidence of women challenging harassment and assault. One anti-harassment organization—Association Europeénne Contre les Violence Faites aux Femmes au Travail—reported a 600% increase in sexual harassment complaints after D.S.K.’s arrest in New York was made public. Women are making complaints against other high-profile men, including French government minister Georges Tron. And, writer Tristane Banon announced, through her attorney, her intent to file a complaint against D.S.K. in France for attempted rape. When she first made a public statement in 2007 about the incident, D.S.K.’s name was bleeped out. Times have changed.

D.S.K.’s arrest is not the only catalyst for change, just the most sensational one. Globalization and multi-national corporations are having an impact on the work culture of France. Sexual harassment training is a normal for French companies that do business with the United States. Moreover, the younger generation of French women is less tolerant of casual misogynism and more willing to stand up for their rights. As these women enter and gain prominence in the workforce, they are bringing in higher expectations and changing the culture.

(Sonya Ziaja, is an American attorney living in Paris, France. She writes regularly for LegalMatch’s Law Blog and Shark. Laser. Blawg.)