'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'Surely there are women who could make up a third of attendees.'

-- Author/activist Marie Wilson (below right), quoted in a Bloomberg article critical of the failure of the Davos World Economic Forum yet again to include at least 30% women in its gatherings. That figure, the article said, is the critical mass, the tipping point, "the level social scientists have found integrates women’s points of view into discussions." A "new policy to attract more women executives" to the annual gabfest in the Swiss Alps -- about which we've previously posted here, here, and here -- seems to have boosted the percentage to "close to 20 percent this year, up from 16 percent last year."

North African People Power

After more than 23 years in office, Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, “Zinochet” as he was dubbed, was forced from power yesterday by popular protests.
These protests began after Mohamed Bou’aziz, an unemployed university graduate in the town of Sidi Bouzid, attempted to burn himself to death on December 17 when the produce he sold on the street to earn a living was confiscated. (He later died of his injuries.)
How could Mr. Bou’aziz know what the implications of his desperate act would be in just one month’s time? His sacrifice inspired huge demonstrations that spread across the North African country, organized in part through resourceful use of Twitter and Facebook. These were met with brutality by the security forces, a grim reality that simply provoked more protest. Unarmed demonstrators were regularly teargassed. Many were arrested. As many as 70-80 people were shot or beaten to death. But the protesters marched on.
This largely peaceful, democratic revolution (on the side of the opposition at least) was not led by or inspired by the fundamentalist movements that have tried to claim the oppositional space in many Arab and North African contexts in recent years. It was instead, by all accounts, a largely secular appeal for real political reform and for social justice. As reflected in today's front page of the Paris daily Liberation (above; credit), women, many unveiled, were increasingly visible in the protest marches.
One can hope that today’s initial victory of North African people power will serve as an example of what is possible in other countries in the region. This is what Noam Chomsky has called the threat of a good example. One dictator brought down by popular revolt – no dictator is safe now.
Hope is a powerful, incandescent force. Hope in the political realm has been a rare commodity of late in this part of the world. Bou’aziz’s revolution may have brought that back. But, just as the power of hope should not be underestimated, neither should the danger of hopes unfulfilled.
It is unclear exactly what the future holds for Tunisia now.
Mohammed al-Ghannouchi, the Prime Minister who has also been in power since 1999, has taken over as President since the departure of ousted President Ben Ali, whom Saudi Arabia "'welcomed.'" A state of emergency was declared, with soldiers guarding public buildings, tanks on the streets of Tunis, and prohibitions on public meetings.
The government must respond to the grievances that first provoked these events – creating jobs, meeting human needs, fostering equality of all kinds, enabling freedom of expression and association, institutionalizing real social democracy – rather than simply engaging in window dressing that preserves the Tunisian system with a different figurehead. The international community, and the U.S. government, should support this process.
The biggest external impact of events in Tunisia could come in neighboring Algeria, which I visited twice last fall, and which witnessed scattered, sporadic émeutes – riots – throughout 2010. The country has just experienced a week of widespread, intensive youth protests that seem to have been the result of a similar long-simmering anger over high unemployment, corruption, economic disparities and la hogra, the arrogance with which officials often treat ordinary people. (photo credit) However, the immediate catalyst was likely the sharp increase in the price of staples like cooking oil and sugar at the beginning of the year. See this useful discussion of the possible causes by journalist Chawki Amari writing in El Watan, one of Algeria’s leading daily newspapers.
Some have suggested that the initial disturbances may have been provoked – perhaps by private interests that control the sugar and oil markets and were unhappy over government regulatory action in this arena. It is hard to say. However, even if this were the case, legitimate popular anger clearly took over from there. Some - only some - of the recent protests turned violent with young rioters throwing stones at police and passing cars, burning tires and looting shops.
Unfortunately, the avenues for peaceful protest are stifled in Algeria due to the continuing imposition of a state of emergency since 1992.

For example, following the week’s protests, last Sunday, January 9, a civic group called the Intercommunal Association of Aïn Benian-Staoueli tried to hold a peaceful gathering in the coastal town of Staoueli about 20 kilometers outside of Algiers. Their efforts were forcefully thwarted by “preventive” arrests. Algerian writer and journalist Mustapha Benfodil, who was attempting to cover the event, was among those arrested. He later recounted his experiences in El Watan, offering an eyewitness account of la hogra in action. As he notes, those picked up by the police that day were suspected of the rather kafka-esque offense of “attempted peaceful gathering.” (They have since been released – though across the country many young protestors remain in jail.)
While the roots of Algeria’s emergency law admittedly lie in the terribly real struggle with armed fundamentalism that consumed the 1990s and claimed as many as 200,000 lives, and the fight against terrorism in Algeria remains a concern in light of the current activities of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, today’s emergency regulations are often used instead against peaceful government critics who have nothing whatsoever to do with such movements. (During the recent protests, attempts by fundamentalists to rally demonstrators to their banner failed resoundingly.)
In fact, the Algerian government now uses the state of emergency to justify the banning of public gatherings of all kinds.

For example, when I visited Algiers in late November to attend a meeting on a proposed draft law on violence against women, the meeting was declared officially non-authorized the day before it was to take place in the central Hotel Safir. Hence, it was held quietly instead in a small room at a more remote location, with many participants unable to attend. It is shocking that a meeting of women working to stop violence against women requires an official permit. Who exactly is being protected by “emergency” legislation in this scenario?

For Algeria’s democratic opposition, the current challenge is to find a way to translate this month’s explosion of youthful anger into positive political change, and to maximize the jolt of energy from events in next door Tunisia. According to Benfodil, the former task requires the mobilization of civil society, trade unions, academics, the middle class, NGOs and others, “if they truly want to transform this impetuous winter into a democratic spring…”

Some believe that it may be difficult to make a real political transformation as long as Algeria’s government possesses the significant material resources it uses to selectively placate sectors of the population. But attempts to publicly speak out for change continue, as witnessed by a peaceful youth demonstration today in Algiers. And it remains to be seen what the impact of the winds blowing from Tunisia now will be.
While in life Mr. Bou’aziz was given little opportunity to have an impact on society, in death he may have helped to change not only his own country, but the entire region.

(Part 1 of a series)

On December 15

On this day in ...
... 1995 (15 years ago today), on the 1st day of a 2-day summit in Madrid, Spain, European leaders unanimously agreed on a timetable for introduction of "a single, unifying currency for the 21st century," which they called the euro (symbol at left). According to The New York Times, the agreement marked an effort by

many European leaders to forge a single currency and a broader economic and political integration of the Continent that they hope will invigorate its flagging economy and insure greater political stability and peace.

The euro would become legal tender at the stroke of midnight January 1, 2002 (at which moment this 'Grrl acquired a mint set of coins and notes, in Salzburg, Austria), and go on to have more notes and coins in circulation than any other type of money, including the U.S. dollar. But it has fallen on hard times amid European economic demise these last months -- so much that some pundits now wonder whether the end of the euro is nigh.

(Prior December 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

On November 21

On this day in ...
... 1990 (20 years ago today), at the same summit (left) discussed in a few days ago in this post, global leaders adopted the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. The charter redirected OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, to correspond to a new geopolitics. (photo credit) As WikiPedia explains:

In effect, the Paris Summit was the peace conference of the Cold War: Perestroika had ultimately put an end to the ideological and political division of the Iron Curtain. Pluralist democracy and market economy were together with international law and multilateralism seen as the victors, and as the common values and principles of national and international conduct that now ruled from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

(Prior November 21 posts are here, here, and here.)

Migration in the age of unemployment

How have migration flows responded to the recession?
The 2010 International Migration Outlook of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provides a comprehensive statistical assessment of migration developments in member nations in 2008. Unsurprisingly, most forms of migration are down, and unemployment is up, among the foreign-born. But there are some unexpected findings, and some findings of particular interest with respect to female migrants.
► While permanent legal migration and temporary migration fell throughout the OECD in 2008 and 2009, asylum applications are on the rise.
► Family ties continued to play a dominant role in permanent lawful migration to the United States, with 65% of permanent flows based on such ties. French and Swedish immigration policies similarly favored family migration; in contrast, in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, labor was the predominant migration rationale.
► The focus of OECD immigration policies continues to be on high-skilled migrants, with very few lawful migration opportunities for the less skilled.
Though one might expect the drop in permanent and temporary migration, the increase in asylum applications is more surprising; one would expect that the recession would make it more difficult for asylum seekers to find the financial means to flee their home country. As it turns out, asylum seekers have been arriving in OECD countries in increasing numbers since 2006, with the United States receiving nearly 40,000 asylum seekers and Canada, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom each receiving over 30,000 asylum seekers in 2008. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia produced the largest numbers of asylum seekers in 2008.
It will be interesting to learn what has happened to student flows and migration-driven population growth in the wake of the recession. The report does not provide these numbers, but found that between 2000 and 2007, international student flows to the OECD doubled, with most studying in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. An average of 21% of students stayed in their host country after completing their degree, remaining through lawful employment status.
The study also reports that migration played a central role in population growth in the OECD between 2003 and 2007, accounting for nearly 60% of population growth. Perhaps most surprisingly, France, New Zealand, and the United States were the only countries for which childbirth was the central cause of population growth. Indeed, in some OECD countries, 90% of population growth was due to migration. If policies to retain migrants are not put in place, these countries may suffer negative population growth in the wake of the recession.
As one would expect, the financial crisis hit immigrants harder: the foreign-born, particularly youth, lost jobs at higher rates than the native-born in nearly all OECD countries. Many countries implemented immigration policies specifically responding to the economic crisis, including provisions for unemployed migrants who couldn't renew their visas, arrangements for their return, and cut-backs in migration quotas.
Perhaps of most interest this readership, in nearly all OECD countries, immigrant women retained their jobs at higher rates than immigrant men. In some cases, immigrant women even increased their rate of participation in the labor market, presumably to account for loss of income from male family members. This of course mirrors the gender impacts of the financial crisis here in the United States; it remains to be seen whether this opportunity for increasing gender equality in the home will translate into real change once the recession has passed.

Pound-foolish complaint

Enough with the false frugality.
This Labor Day weekend ends a summer that was long, hot,* and dismal. Economic news? Bad to worse. So too analyses of what’s to come.
Having predicted downturn long before many in the mainstream media, this ’Grrl is hardly a Pollyanna on fiscal policy. Nonetheless, I can’t wait for a theme running through much commentary to run its course.
The theme cropped up again a few days ago, in Maureen Dowd’s kvetch about a White House makeover. Key quote among many swipes:

The recession redo, paid for by the nonprofit White House Historical Association, was the latest tone-deaf move by a White House that was supposed to excel at connection and communication. Message: I care, but not enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations.

As we've posted in another context, concern about poor Presidential communication is well founded.
Concern about spending, not so much.
As any student of ECON 101 well knows, underdemand means oversupply. Not a good thing. If no one buys, sellers lose out. Stores close and employees are out of work.
Recovery requires that persons who can – CEOs, persons who saved well during the last bubble, and yes, the 1st Family – should spend. New carpets and remade couches. R&R at the Vineyard, and the Gulf coast. Spain, even.
Stirring of the economic pot is what's in order – not a populist tune that may sound good but is, in the end, unsound.

　
* So it’s reported, from reaches of the United States outside the zone of cold coastal fog that cloaked the San Francisco Bay Area lo! these many months.

On August 3

On this day in ...
... 2000 (10 years ago today), in Brussels, Belgium, the European Commission opened an antitrust case against Microsoft, the U.S. software giant. Microsoft was given 2 months to reply to a set of EC objections. In 2003, a suit would be filed, eventually resulting in a 2007 judgment by the Grand Chamber of the Court of First Instance of the European Communities. That tribunal imposed fines against Microsoft. Disputes continue.


(Prior August 3 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 20

On this day in ...
... 1945 (65 years ago today), Senate-approved legislation leading to U.S. ratification of the Bretton Woods Agreement won "prompt acceptance" in the House of Representatives, which had okayed an earlier version before Senate deliberations began. The bill "was on its way by air to President Truman for his signature at Potsdam," Germany, where Truman was attending the Allied summit conference. Concluded at a 44-country conference at a resort hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (above left), in 1944, the agreement at issue called for establishment of global financial institutions that would foster economic reconstruction much needed after World War II.

(Prior July 20 posts are here, here, and here.)

Developing Countries Confront Global Economic Crisis

The global economic meltdown was so yesterday. Seldom does the crisis make it on to the front pages of any of the major newspapers anymore, but the struggle for recovery continues in the shadows. Already, fissures are appearing in the once-unified front of the developed countries. European governments such as Germany are calling for a greater focus on controlling deficit spending, while President Obama has called for more spending to shore up flagging economies. But while the North struggles over the various modes of recovery, the developing world must deal with the fallout. This week, for the first time the World Trade Organization is set to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on those countries. A powerful coalition of developing countries, including India, South Africa, Argentina and Ecuador, had lobbied vigorously for such a discussion because in their view the North's massive bailouts amounted to illegal subsidies that have adversely impacted financial markets in the developing world. Can these bailouts prompt a WTO dispute brought on by developing countries?

Hamid Mamdouh, director of the WTO's services division, is reported to have said "There is a legal cover for situations where members might deviate from their legal commitments and obligations" but the situation is not so clear cut. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) does include what is known as a "prudential carve-out," which is meant to allow regulators the policy space to address financial crises. Article 2 of the GATS Annex on Financial Services states that a WTO member “shall not be prevented from taking measures for prudential reasons.” The prudential carve out is subject to WTO dispute settlement, however, if a member believes the provision is being abused, is discriminatory or is a disguised non-tariff barrier to trade. The matter has never been litigated before, and what standard of review the WTO would apply under the circumstances is an open question.

But would a developing country (or a group) actually raise a dispute settlement claim? Beyond the legal issues, there are both economic and political considerations for developing countries to deal with. Countries like the United States have the political clout to fend off a potential case. Moreover, the economic recovery of the North is in everyone's interest -- developing countries rely on their markets, not to mention their technical and financial assistance. A dispute on this issue -- at least in the near future -- seems unlikely. But this makes the upcoming discussions at the WTO all the more important. The organization must provide a forum to at least acknowledge that developing countries are another in a long line of innocent victims of this economic crisis (photo credit).

Guest Blogger: Claire Moore Dickerson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Claire Moore Dickerson (left) as today's guest blogger.
Claire is the Senator John B. Breaux Professor of Business Law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Lousiana, and also a permanent visiting professor at the University of Buea in Cameroon. She has conducted considerable research in that country and elsewhere in Africa, especially the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Her scholarship -- including the co-authored Unified Business Laws for Africa (2009) -- is noted for its application of socioeconomic principles to business-related areas and for its focus on the intersection of commerce and human rights.
In her guest post below, Claire discusses her article, forthcoming next January in the American Journal of Comparative Law; it examines business law and informal-sector entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Claire teaches Business Enterprises, International Business Transactions, Contracts, and a Comparative Corporate Governance Seminar. She came to Tulane from Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, New Jersey, where she was Professor of Law, Dickson Scholar, Schuchman Fellow, Co-Director of the Global Legal Studies program, and holder of the Visiting Lowenstein Chair. She also taught at the law school as St. John's University.
She holds an A.B. magna cum laude from Wellesley College, a J.D. from Columbia University, where she was a Stone Scholar, and an LL.M. in Taxation from New York University. Before entering law teaching she was a partner at the New York office of Coudert Brothers, and later at Philadelphia's Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis.
She's active in several professional organizations, including the Law & Society Association and the American Society of International Law, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Section on Socio-Economics of the Association of American Law Schools.
In a further guest post below, Claire dedicates her contribution to 2 foremothers, Maître Alice Roullet-Piccard and Dr. Dorothea May Moore.

Heartfelt welcome!

Sub-Saharan development & business laws

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post on research to be published as "Informal-Sector Entrepreneurs, Development and Formal Law: A Functional Understanding of Business Law," 59 American Journal of Comparative Law (January 2011), as well as my dedication below to two foremothers)

While discussing the policies of the prior US administration towards his country, a respected Senior Barrister in Cameroon trotted out the old adage:

'Give people fish, and you feed them for today. Teach them to fish, and you have fed them for a lifetime.'

He was, of course, asking that donor institutions and donor states provide tools that reinforce independence rather than mere handouts. This perspective does seem consistent with a trend by the World Bank, among others, to encourage business, including smaller businesses.

Indeed, prodded by economists seeking to encourage development by facilitating business, this international financial institution has over the past half-dozen years paid very serious attention to the role of business laws. Consider, for example, the World Bank’s “Doing Business” reports, annual compilations of studies focused on the contribution of law to the business environment in emerging economies.

It is easy for us in the global North, especially as we endure the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, to be cynical about the ability of business laws to facilitate development. Business laws have failed to protect the overall business environment, including the availability of credit.

As we consider what regulations to impose on the largest financial and other companies here, politicians and economists are contemplating the long-term impact on the entire business community. Thus, small businesses should care about the regulations constraining the most powerful actors in their economy. Still, their daily ability to work in sanitary, lighted, safe environments, and to expect the machinery of government to support their commercial contracts, continues to be protected.

In Sub-Saharan Africa,

► To what extent can law restrain the excesses of the most powerful agent, typically the state, while facilitating business on the ground?

► To what extent can laws help create a business environment that most closely mimics that of the global North — where, in the best of circumstances, the most powerful actors are adequately controlled?

The Sub-Saharan business climate is, of course, fundamentally different.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector represents 40-60% of gross domestic product, according to a study by Friedrich Schneider. International Labor Organization figures state that this sector employs as much as 93% of non-agricultural workers.

The informal sector thus is highly important. Yet formal law does not penetrate easily or predictably there. For this reason, simple transplantation of classic business law from the global North will not be sufficient to protect and support the business either of an informal-sector-market woman or street vendor, or even of the many business people who have a foot in both the formal and informal sectors.

The focus has to be on functionality.

The goal is to serve the informal sector with laws that accomplish there what classic business laws do for the smaller businesses of the global North. Specifically, laws should increase the predictability of transactions while limiting abuse from government and other powerful agents.

The attack should be two-pronged.
► Formal law both can constrain formal-sector actors, such as some landlords transacting with informal-sector businesses, and can mandate that formal-sector actors provide pro-business realities that Northern businesses enjoy, including sanitary work environments. Precisely because these actors are in the formal sector, they are subject to government regulation — even if the landlord is in fact the government.
► The second prong still cannot directly affect the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs, those self-employed workers who typically operating alone or with family, and with very modest sales. These workers will not be directly affected because, almost by definition, they are at best unpredictably subject to formal laws and regulations. On the other hand, nano-entrepreneurs do tend to have a legal regime, or a quasi- legal traditional regime, that affects businesses.

This second prong, in turn, deploys two strategies to allow formal law to have as direct an impact as possible on the informal sector.
►► The first strategy aimed at the informal sector is to have formal laws that reinforce existing business norms. These laws are the most likely to support effectively a North-style predictability, since the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs are primed to comply.
►► The second strategy aimed at the informal sector emphasizes the importance of encouraging coordination of consumers of law. This strategy is especially important when the applicable legal system is highly centralized — as is typically the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Discussion of relatively developed countries and their formal economies may be found in Law & Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World (2008), by Columbia Law Professors Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor.)

Laws promoting coordination include West and Central Africa’s Economic Interest Group (specifically, Sections 869-885 of the OHADA Commercial Companies and EIG Uniform Act), as well as other laws that promote cooperatives. A case in point is the self-coordination effort in the Ghanaian chocolate industry, described here. (credit for photo of woman in Ghana holding fair-trade chocolate) (Prior IntLawGrrls post on problems in the chocolate industry.)

In short, the additional strategy aimed at the informal sector workers is to facilitate the formation of cooperatives.

The goal is for business-related laws to achieve in Sub-Saharan Africa the functionality that classic business laws offer, in the best of times, to businesses of the global North.

Towards holistic transnational protection against kidnapping: public law approaches

(Thank you to IntLawGrrls for the invitation to provide a guest post based on a forthcoming article of mine)

My most recent area of research is the global criminal phenomenon of kidnapping as it relates to an increased presentation of asylum claims in the United States, Canada, Belgium, France, United Kingdom and New Zealand.
This most striking aspect of this problem is that the private market is both part of its origin and part of its solution.
Inequitable enjoyment of socio-economic resources and the exclusion from participation in formal markets prompt marginalized individuals to pursue the criminal market of kidnapping, in which the human body becomes the ultimate commodity. In turn, corrupt and ineffective judicial bodies and police leave family members little choice but to employ private security and insurance companies. This creates a growth industry based on safe return of victims.
At the international level, there has been increased attention, not only from the UN Economic and Social Council, but also from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (above right), who declared in 2009:

Kidnapping is an inhumane and unjustifiable crime, as well as a gross violation of international human rights and humanitarian law.

Among the related human rights at stake, one may cite:
► guarantees of liberty, physical integrity and security, and the prohibition of arbitrary detention, as detailed in Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
► the right to life, as in Article 6 of the ICCPR;
► the prohibition against torture, in Article 7;
the ban on interference with family, Article 17; and
► protection against sexual violence, established in, for example, the November 16, 2009, judgment (available in Spanish) by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Gonzalez et. al. v. Mexico.
Indeed, the most relevant case law has emerged at the regional level, where the focus is on state responsibility for investigating and punishing kidnappers.
The Inter-American Court thus issued 2 notable provisional orders, in:
► In the Matter of the Communities of Jiguamiandó and Curbaradó, a case involving the kidnapping and murder of a manm allegedly via complicity by police and paramilitary; the order called for State investigation, identification of perpetrators, and punishment; and
► In the Matter of the United States of Mexico Digna Ochoa y Plácido et. al., in which the order called upon the State to protect the lives of human rights activists who had been subject to kidnapping.
Similarly, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has repeatedly condemned kidnapping by nonstate actors in countries including Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Brazil.
In like manner are decisions of the European Court of Human Rights:
► In the case of Avsar v. Turkey, the Court held Turkey to be in violation of Articles 2 (right to life) and 13 (effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights, for failing to carry out adequate and effective investigation in a case involving the kidnapping and killing of a man by village guards with complicity by the state.
► The Court held Russia liable for violation of the same articles in Elmurzayev and others v. Russia and Khadzhialiyev and others v. Russia, cases involving kidnappings by “unidentified armed men” and subsequent delays by the state in investigation and proceedings respecting those crimes.
In large part, the international community’s response to the global threat of kidnapping is reflected in the innovative institutional trend towards horizontal and vertical cooperation across the public-private divide. Initiatives to combat the spread of kidnapping include assistance in border control, intelligence-sharing, police training, and management (seeking transparency, accountability, and professionalization), telecommunication interception, assistance in legislative amendments, extradition, and overview of financial transactions.
Furthermore, there are increased calls for strengthening citizen and community participation in the implementation of security plans. The European Council issued Recommendation 2007/562/EC of 12 June 2007, which requires states to share information in all terrorist kidnappings. Similarly, the need for international cooperation to address crime (including kidnapping) has been promoted by the Organization of American States Permanent Council’s Special Committee on Transnational Organized Crime and the Ministers Responsible for Public Security.

It is important to note issues of continuing concern:
► We still await the establishment of implementation mechanisms for the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime; and
► None of these initiatives highlights the importance of asylum, for victims and their families, as an element of holistic protection.

Read On! Bubbly biography

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading)

Today's Valentine's Day.* 'Round the world thoughts turn to celebration of love and friendship. No doubt some will feature "a bottle of the Widow," as the British used to call the bubbly treat to the right. No better time, then, to post on the recent biography of the woman behind the bottle. The title says it all: The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (2009).

In a scant 200 pages, the book illuminates a central fact: the signature on each bottle's egg-yolk-orange label, "V Clicquot Ponsardin," is not the autograph of a fictitious woman conjured, like Betty Crocker, by an office-full of admen. Rather, the signature belongs to a real woman who lived a full and real life, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin (below left).

Born in 1777 in Reims, a city in France's Champagne region, Barbe-Nicole lived in a period marked by the political tumult of Revolution, Empire, Restoration, Republic. Marriage arranged at 21 ended when Barbe-Nicole was widowed at age 27, her husband rumored a suicide. Single mother of a young daughter, she eschewed remarriage for a path far less tread by women of the day: she made champagne, 1st for elite imperial palates, and eventually, through her manufacturing and marketing innovations, for a vast and thirsty middle class. In painstaking research of records maddeningly devoid of personal details, author Tilar J. Mazzeo (below right), Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, could find no evidence that Barbe-Nicole ever left France. Yet energy and hard work -- plus a keen competitive edge that finds her running contraband wine through wartime blockades -- made Barbe-Nicole, by age 40,

one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs in all of Europe and one of the first businesswomen in history to lead an international commercial empire.

(p. xvii) It was a role unique for the time (approached perhaps only by Louise Pommery, a somewhat younger Frenchwoman who invented the brut style of champagne). Curiously, it's a role away from which Barbe-Nicole steered her own surviving heirs, a daughter and granddaughter. Thus it would take generations before women of business looked to la Veuve for inspiration. Yet before her death at age 89 she urged her granddaughter to excel in other pursuits, as is evident from this letter (p. 181):

'The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous...!!'

To those words and the woman who wrote them, a Valentine's Day toast.

* It's also the 1st day of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger (prior post), but that's another story.

On February 13

On this day in ...
... 1918, Betty Mattas was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Married while a student at Pennsylvania State University, Betty James (right) eventually would collaborate with her inventor husband to produce the time-honored "helical spring" toy known for its ability to "travel down stairs end-over-end as it stretches and re-forms itself with the aid of gravity and its own momentum." (photo credit) It is, of course, the Slinky, initially priced at $1 out of James' concern that it be accessible to low-income buyers. James served as chief executive officer of her family-owned business for nearly 4 decades. She retired in 1998, and in 2001 "became one of the few women inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame." She died last November at age 90.

(Prior February 13 posts are here and here.)

Online women's museum

Just stumbled on a most intriguing concept -- a museum present not as bricks and mortar in some city, but rather online everywhere.
It's the International Musuem of Women, by its own description

a groundbreaking social change museum that connects and inspires people with powerful ideas and new ways of thinking that transform women's lives and the world. With its unique focus on cultural change, I.M.O.W. advances the human right to gender equity worldwide.

The online version appears to have emerged a few years ago, out of an earlier, more traditional effort that had begun in 1985. Its prior online exhibits -- all multilingual -- include "Imagining Ourselves: A Global Generation of Women," launched in 2006, and "Women, Power and Politics," launched in 2008. Currently featured is "Economica: Women and the Global Economy," online since October.I.M.O.W. also undertakes education and events.
Check it out.

Sufferin' suffragettes

There's a tendency to romanticize our foremothers in what's known as the 1st wave of feminism. Back then, sometimes, they were called by the diminutive term "suffragettes"; they're known today, more often, as "suffragists."
We think of them -- indeed, we IntLawGrrls have posted on them -- as hardy women:
► Women who dove under race horses to draw attention. Women who spoke and wrote about their sisters' plight. (Also here, here, here, and here.)
► Women who went to jail rather than accept criminal fines for "disturbing the peace" by pressing their cause. (Also here and here and here and here.)
► Women who marched till they wore down the soles of their high-heeled -- and often high-buttoned -- shoes.
But not all women, it seems. Nor all shoes.
A dispatch entitled WOMEN MUST HIKE OR PAY, published in the January 18, 1913, edition of The New York Times, reported on suffragists' fear that a planned "mandatory" march on Washington would be "a fizzle," for the simple reason that not enough women wanted to march.
Solution?
The wealthy among them were permitted to buy their way out of the long haul. As The Times put it:

Those of the ardent suffragists who talk loud and do little are to be permitted to purchase immunity from the long hike from New York to Washington only by hiring a substitute and paying her expenses.

The decision to allow immunity-purchase was made by "Gen. Rosalie Jones," shown standing in the crossing-the-Delaware caricature at right (credit), at the request of one "Mrs. Travis Cochran, a wealthy woman of this city, who is interested in 'the cause,'" The Times wrote from Philadelphia, the "city" of dispatch. (One suspects the latter part of this item refers to the "well-connected" Mary Peppers Cochran.)
Guess all this oughtn't come as that much of a surprise.
Consider, for example, the unsympathetic portrait of "Mrs. Banks" in the Disney version of Mary Poppins (1964). Perhaps the best line that Mrs. B -- Winifred, that is -- has is this one, part of the rousing musical number in the clip at bottom:

Our daughters' daughters will adore us and they'll sing in grateful chorus, 'Well done, sister suffragettes.'

The script says otherwise, however; the London banker's wife is continually out the door, on her way to a suffrage meeting, leaving wee Jane and Michael in the care of ... whomever.
But let's not judge our 1st-wave foremothers too harshly.
After all, in a similar vein, a lot of Unionist men paid $300 each to buy their way out of service in America's Civil War -- men like Jay Gould, Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, James Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. The choice freed each to become a human engine of America's industrial and financial revolution.
And their Mrs.?

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'There ain't going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan.'

-- U.S. Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin), Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, during a television interview with ABC News, in which he makes a connection between overseas military intervention and the domestic economy -- a connection on which IntLawGrrls posted way-back-when.

For world's women, recession goes on

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post about my scholarship on women and international economic law)

Goldman Sachs may be out of the woods, but the Great Recession is not over for the world’s women.

Will it ever be?

Consider these "Facts & Figures on Women, Poverty & Economics," compiled by UNIFEM, the U.N. Development Fund for Women:

► Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.
► Women constitute around 60% to 80% percent of the export manufacturing workforce in the developing world, a sector the World Bank expects to shrink significantly during the economic crisis.
► The global economic crisis is expected to plunge a further 22 million women into unemployment, which would lead to a female unemployment rate of 7.4 percent (versus 7 percent of male unemployment).

The chasm between the rich and the poor has become unfathomable.

As a recent U.N. study explains, global wealth is distributed "as if one person in a group of ten takes 99% of the total pie and the others share the remaining 1%." Few argue that this is inevitable or unimportant, but there is little consensus on how to proceed.

What should be done?

Who should do it?

These questions should not be left entirely to politicians, economists, and celebrities.

In a recent article, "Theories of Poverty/The Poverty of Theory," 2009 Brigham Young Law Review 381, I consider the usefulness (or not) of legal theory. The article explains how liberal theories in particular dominate post-Cold War approaches to poverty, as shown in three major legal instruments. It then introduces other theories of poverty, those of liberalism’s 'discontents,' conspicuously absent from post-Cold War discourse. The article concludes by focusing on the limits of theory itself in a liberal international system that has neither the legal muscle to effectively address global poverty nor the political will to develop it.

A second article, "Jam Tomorrow: The Limits of International Economic Law," forthcoming in the Boston College Third World Journal, asks whether existing international economic law -- including the law governing and generated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank -- has the capacity to realize distributive justice. The question takes on special relevance with the election of an American President explicitly committed to reducing economic inequality (at least domestically).

"Distributive justice" is an ambiguous goal. If we simply mean "more fair than what we have now," "distributive justice" is within easy reach, since we could hardly do worse. As a threshold question, accordingly, it should be established what, exactly, is required for actual "distributive justice." I take as a starting point the relatively modest objective of the Millennium Development Goals — to halve the number living in extreme poverty, i.e., subsisting on less than $1 a day, by 2015. As economist Jeffrey Sachs points out, the wealth is still there. It is just a matter of moving it around.

"Jam Tomorrow" argues that this is not going to happen, because:

► 1st, this is not an objective of international economic law; and

► 2d, even if the political will were there, it would not happen because "international economic law" is not a coherent legal subject with the capacity to make it happen. Neoliberalism cannot be relied upon to produce distributive justice, but neoliberalism is not the only game in town.

Constructive alternatives?

Microfinance is fine, but markets are no silver bullet. For further thought, see, for example:

► Human Rights And The Global Marketplace: Economic, Social And Cultural Dimensions, by Jeanne M. Woods, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, and IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis, Northeastern University School of Law;

► Dr. Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law School, on the capabilities approach, in her 2001 book Women and Human Development; and

► The brilliant essay on "Exploitation" by Dr. Susan Marks, King's College London, in the 2008 collection that she edited, entitled International Law on the Left.

(credit for photo of food charity in Australia; credit for woman at handloom in India)

On October 29

On this day in ...
... 1929 (80 years ago today), The New York Times reported, "Stocks Collapse In 16,410,030-share Day, But Rally At Close Cheers Brokers; Bankers Optimistic, To Continue Aid." Optimism would be shortlived; the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of '29 led to the bleak decade known as the Great Depression. (credit for photo made on the day, captioned "A solemn crowd gathers outside the Stock Exchange after the crash")
... 1952, U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) was born in Cleveland. Fudge took office on November 19, 2008, having been elected to fill a vacancy occasioned by the death of Stephanie Tubbs Jones and, beginning in January 2009, to serve her own 2-year term in Congress.

(Prior October 29 posts are here and here.)

Remittances to Africa

Yesterday, the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) released a report on remittances to Africa. The report notes that the 30 million members of the African diaspora abroad contribute annually approximately $40 billion in remittances -- a number that far exceeds official development assistance for the region as a whole and that is greater than foreign direct investment for many countries. As a result, "[p]articularly in these times of financial turmoil, workers’ remittances are being recognized for their contribution to the economic health of the region’s nations, as well as for their vital importance to recipient families." In the interest of increasing the development impact of these remittances, IFAD examines the competitiveness and regulation of as well as access to African remittance markets.
The picture is not pretty: two major money transfer companies control 65 percent of all remittance payout locations, and these companies require that agents sign exclusivity agreements, creating serious barriers to market entry. Moreover, 80 percent of African countries allow only banks and foreign exchange bureaus to offer remittance services. As a result, microfinance institutions, which may be better located and structured to serve rural and less wealthy customers, constitute less than 3 percent of remittance payers. IFAD cautions that a regulatory fix alone will be insufficient to jump-start microfinance; most of these institutions currently lack capacity and will need significant technical assistance in order to offer remittance services that will maximize development impact.
Of particular interest is the impact of remittances on gender disparities in income:

Average monthly income excluding remittances is significantly higher for men (US$195) than for women (US$175). Interestingly, when the receiving of remittances is included, women have a slightly higher monthly income (US$226) than male remittance recipients (US$218). Among non-recipients, men have significantly higher monthly incomes (US$195 versus US$164 for women).

Moreover, female remittance recipients have, on average, 2.5 times the savings of non-recipients.
Lowering the cost and increasing the development impact of remittances seems an uncontroversially desirable goal. To that end, IFAD recommends more regular study of remittances to Africa; reforming regulation to encourage competition in services, including by supporting microfinance institutions; and building capacity by providing technical assistance to microfinance institutions and financial literacy programs for remittance recipients. These approaches fall squarely within the African Union's mission of sustainable and self-reliant development, and may be promising candidates for regional regulation and coordination.