Profile:
Jennifer graduated from the Charleston School of Law in May 2008. While at Charleston, she served as an editor of the Charleston Law Review, member of the International Law Society, and competitor in the 2007 Jessup International Moot Court Competition. She spent her third year of law school as a visiting student at Georgetown University Law Center. While at Georgetown, Jennifer participated in the Women’s International Human Rights Clinic focusing her studies on women’s equal rights to land and inheritance in Kenya. She worked with FIDA-Kenya, conducting interviews in Kenya to gather research for the human rights report she co-authored, “Empowering Women through Equal Rights to Inheritance.” Jennifer did her Fellowship with the Board of Veterans Appeals where she focused her research on women veterans’ issues concerning service-related post traumatic stress disorder and abuse.
During her Fellowship year, Jennifer worked with a mentor to gain an in-depth knowledge of the law of veteran’s benefits. Jennifer also researched and wrote a law review article about post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from sexual abuse in the military that was published in
in the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law. She comments: "The article speaks to the challenges that female veterans affected by PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) face when filing for disability benefits through the Deptartment of Veterans Affairs." She met with numerous government officials and veterans’ organizations to conduct her research, and her article analyzes hidden sex discrimination in the way PTSD regulations are written. Jennifer indicated that, “as they currently exist, combat veterans have the lowest evidentiary standard to meet in order to get benefits for PTSD. Combat veterans are primarily male because women are not [technically] allowed to engage in land combat. The evidentiary standard for proving military sexual trauma in order to get PTSD benefits is higher than the combat standard. Most victims of [military sexual trauma] are female... Furthermore, it is a medical fact that one’s chance of developing PTSD after a sexual attack is much greater than after combat. Therefore, although the two regulations are written in a gender neutral way, they favor male veterans and are discriminatory in their effect on female vets.” The article expresses concern that these regulations “pose a higher burden of proof for female veterans than male veterans… In sum, these regulations impose an unfairly high evidentiary standard on women (conceptually equal to the male standard) because they do not consider the unique challenges women face in producing evidence of MST or combat – namely documentation. I make an argument to change the VA regulations and also for Congress to lift the ban prohibiting females from engaging in land combat action.” To view the article, click here.
Jennifer cotaught an International Women's Human Rights course at George Washington University Law School with Nancy Cantalupo during the spring semester and is currently teaching a course on promotion of the rule of law in China at Georgetown Law. Her international human rights report on Kenya, Empowering Women with Rights to Inheritance: A Report on Amendments to the Law of Succession Act Necessary to Ensure Women’s Human Rights will be published this fall in the Georgetown Journal of International Law.
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