Welcome To Zasha

Spenta Cama is a lawyer in New York with a current focus on corporate, transactional work, but a passion for civil rights and women’s rights.  During college at American University in Washington, D.C., she volunteered with numerous organizations including working as a counselor at a men’s halfway house for the Coalition for the Homeless, D.C. Cares, the Public Defender Service, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.  Prior to the 1992 Presidential election, Spenta single-handedly organized a voter registration drive in the Northeast D.C. community, going door to door to assist residents in completing voter registration forms and personally delivered each form to the local elections board office.  Before attending law school, she worked as a paralegal at the Middlesex County Legal Services office assisting mental health clients to obtain Social Security disability benefits at administrative hearings, and also advocated for senior citizens on various legal issues, including education on Medicare and Medicaid.

Spenta continued her public interest bent while attending Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey.  She participated in the Urban Legal Clinic to advocate for the local community in court cases.  She was the first recipient of the Marsha Wenk fellowship in public interest law, working at the ACLU of New Jersey.  Spenta interned with various public interest organizations dedicated to environmental or women’s rights issues.   She was awarded the Judge J. Skelly Wright Prize at graduation for most work in civil rights.  Upon graduation, she was a law clerk to then Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz of the New Jersey Supreme Court.  Spenta then spent two years as a public interest fellow at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, focused on state and federal impact litigation as well as policy issues involving women’s rights.  She successfully argued a precedent-setting case establishing a public policy exception for protecting domestic violence victims from wrongful termination of employment in Massachusetts.

Even while practicing corporate law, Spenta maintains her public interest activism including pro bono hearings to assist people with special needs on informed decisions for non-emergency medical treatment, advocating against child marriage with Unchained at Last, volunteering with her local Meals on Wheels for seniors, and as a coach in the Buddy Ball program which provides activities for children with developmental disabilities to play recreational sports.  She is also active in her local ZAGNY community, from serving on past boards and coordinating youth programs for the North American Zoroastrian Congress that ZAGNY hosted in 2012.