Welcome Connie de la Vega, Christiana Ochoa

Pleased to announce the arrival of 2 of our colleagues, Connie de la Vega (left) and Christiana Ochoa (right), to our blog. They join Kristine A. Huskey and Fiona de Londras as our newest IntLawGrrls.
Professor of Law and Academic Director of International Programs at California's University of San Francisco School of Law, Connie's a specialist in international human rights law. In addition to academic publications, she's written amicus briefs that explain international norms in the context of matters like capital punishment and affirmative action, has testified as an expert, and has participated at U.N. meetings. She's chosen the artist Frida Kahlo as her IntLawGrrls transnational foremother.
Christiana's scholarship examines the interrelationship of international economic activity and human rights. Before joining the University of Indiana School of Law in Bloomington, which she is an Associate Professor of Law, she was an associate in the Banking and Finance Group at Clifford Chance in New York. As she explains below, she's chosen Muna Lee, Pan-American feminist and active participant in the founding of the Inter-American Commission for Women, as her IntLawGrrls transnational foremother.
Heartfelt welcome!

On July 6, ...

1907 (100 years ago today), Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City to Guillermo, a Germany-born photographer of Hungarian Jewish descent, and Matilda, of Spanish and Native American ancestry. Convalescence forced by an accident in her 20s prompted Frida to begin the painting career for which she remains famous. Her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, was 1 of the loves of her life. She lived in the United States as well as Mexico, as depicted in this self-portrait on the border. Also "active in leftist causes," shortly before her death in 1954 a wheelchair-bound Kahlo appeared publicly to support "Communist-backed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala."
... 2005, by a vote of 11 to 10, a Chilean court stripped former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution on charges relating to the killings in 1975 of 119 dissidents. On appeal some lifting of immunity was approved, but Pinochet died in 2006 before any trial commenced.