Susan Deller Ross, Professor of Law, Director and Founder of IWHRC
B.A. Knox College; J.D. New York University

Susan Deller Ross is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Director and Founder of the IWHRC.  Before joining the Georgetown law faculty in 1983, she was Special Counsel for Sex Discrimination Litigation to the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Previously, she was Clinical Director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She has filed numerous amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court on women's rights issues and has testified at a number of U.S. congressional hearings concerning sex discrimination. She was one of the attorneys who represented Anita Hill in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas congressional hearings.  In addition to founding and teaching in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, she has taught Domestic Relations Law and Advocacy and Employment Discrimination Law and Advocacy in Georgetown’s Clinical Programs.  She has also taught International and Comparative Law on the Women's Human Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity Law, Family Law, and Gender and the Law.

Professor Ross has published widely in the area of women's rights. Her recent books include Women’s Human Rights:  The International and Comparative Law Casebook (2008) and Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice & Theory (co-authored with Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Wendy Webster Williams, Rhonda Copelon, Deborah Rhode, and Nadine Taub) (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2d ed. 1996).  Her recent articles on international women’s human rights include:

• Fact-Finding as a Lawmaking Tool for Advancing Women’s Human Rights, 7 Geo. J. Gender & L. 331 (2006) (co-authored with Tamar Ezer).
• Polygyny as a Violation of Women’s Right to Equality in Marriage: An Historical, Comparative and International Overview, 24 Delhi L. Rev. 22 (2002).

Professor Ross also speaks regularly to audiences around the world.  Her recent presentations include:

• Implementation and Enforcement of International Women’s Human Rights Treaties
  University of Tana
  Antananarivo, Madagascar
• Implementation and Enforcement of International Women’s Human Rights Treaties
  Guatemala Judicial School
• Advancing Women’s Human Rights Through Legal Change:  The Value of Gender Expertise
  Keynote address for Inaugural Program, Master's Degree in Gender, Women's Rights, and Access to Justice
  San Carlos University Law School
  Guatemala City, Guatemala
• Expert Consultation on Litigation:  Using International Human Rights Treaties to Enforce Reproductive Rights
  Center for Reproductive Rights
  New York, NY
• Advancing Women’s Human Rights Through Equal Protection and Equality Guarantees in National, Regional, and International Human Rights Instruments
  Global Alliance for Justice Education Inaugural Conference
  Kerala, India
• Legal Mechanisms to Remedy Discrimination
  Conference on Institutional Mechanisms for the Protection of Human Rights at the Lithuanian Constitutional Court
• Legal Remedies Under U.S. Law for Sexual Harassment and Domestic Violence
  Police Academy
  Vilinus, Lithuania
• Foreign and International Experience in the Protection of Women's Rights
  Keynote address to the Mongolian Women's Rights Seminar
  Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

 

Aram Schvey, Supervising Attorney & Teaching Fellow
A.B. cum laude Harvard University, 1997; M.A. Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 2001; J.D. cum laude Georgetown University Law Center, 2001

Aram is in his second year at the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic.  This semester, he is supervising litigation projects in Cameroon challenging an adultery law that defines adultery more leniently for men than women, and a series of “head-of-household” provisions that declare the husband to be the head of the household, and entitle him to veto his wife’s employment, decide the location of the marital home, and manage the marital property.  Last year, Aram supervised several projects examining the intersection of women’s rights and the AIDS epidemic, including projects in Kenya, Guyana, and the United States (Arkansas and Washington, D.C.).

Before joining the Clinic, he served as Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  While there, he litigated a number of constitutional challenges under the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment, including a successful challenge to the refusal by the Department of Veterans Affairs to inscribe the Wiccan Pentacle on servicemembers’ graves.  From 2004-05, he served as the Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and as an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University School of Law, where he taught a course and led a fact-finding mission to Romania to examine anti-Roma school segregation.  He has also worked as an international-litigation associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City, and clerked for two federal judges:  Judge Jack B. Weinstein (E.D.N.Y.) and Judge Allen G. Schwartz (S.D.N.Y.).

 

Jennifer Lindner, Office Manager
B.A., Wheaton College

Jennifer Lindner is the Office Manager/Executive Assistant for the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic and the Domestic Violence Clinic, where she manages the day-to-day operations of both.  Her work for the clinics includes referral and docket monitoring for the Domestic Violence Clinic, planning the annual fact finding trips for the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, and financial and administrative support for both.  She comes to the Law Center from a position in Georgetown’s School of Nursing and Health Studies where she worked as a Research Associate, supporting projects examining the developmental and psychological links between children’s health and education.  Her B.A. is in psychology, with a minor in political science.

In the spring of 2008 she traveled with the Clinic to Nairobi, Meru, & Nanyuki, Kenya to support and coordinate its fact finding investigation of women’s property and inheritance rights.  Jennifer is also a part-time student in the J.D. program at Georgetown which she expects to complete in 2012.

Revised September 22, 2009 (MA)