ABOUT CLAIRE
Claire has been a musician, lawyer and government business relations consultant. She was a syndicated legal columnist and op-ed contributor as well as an opinion columnist for the Report on Business in Toronto's Globe & Mail. Creator of the You! be the Judge legal column, syndicated in Canada and the U.S., she produced the You! be the Judge radio show and podcast. She's now a street photographer (alias streetwalker!) and blogger.
"Each career morphed into the other. And each was built on five elements: An idea out of the blue; A child's basic understanding of law: "Ma, it aint fair"; A madness to create something I knew nothing about paired with a compulsion to realize the idea; And... Terror! To paraphrase Ed Catmull, head of Disney-Pixar, in his book Creativity Inc.: 'It's like pummeling at 90 miles an hour in a dark tunnel, holding on for dear life, and praying there is light at the end of the tunnel.'"
Illustration by Joanna Hegemann
Acknowledgments
My heart felt thanks to John Worsley Simpson, editor par excellence, and a “real” published writer, who gave my writing a patina that opened up the world of Op-Ed and the Report on Business.
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And my deep felt thanks to Jeffrey Gibbons, my present day elegant editor and super smart brainstorming sparring partner , who, together with my super savy computer consultant, Jean Pierre Duchastel, have kept me alive and well .....and securely grounded!
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I stand in awe of my multi-talented daughter, Elissa Bernstein, lawyer, actor, speaker and acting and voice coach, and writer, who took over the writing of You! Be the Judge three years into its existence, and got it to flourish with her hysterically funny wit, her consuming passion for legal accuracy, her depth of understanding of the human condition. and her deep kindness to all stray humans and animals, including her mother!
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And I stand in awe of the courage that no no bounds of my daughter Johannah. a courage that's best exemplified when she was climbing a mountain, her equipment failed her and she was pummelting down to sure death. With superhuman will she twisted her body around and with excruciating pain dug her nails into the rock and arrested the fall. This is the same courage that has driven her through the multifaceted climbs in her life.