Jennie Green

Clinical Professor of Law Jennifer M. Green joined the faculty in the fall of 2009 from her positions as senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and adjunct professor at the International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic, City University of New York School of Law. She specializes in international and international human rights law, and in litigation in U.S. courts and the international legal systems.

Previously, she was clinical project supervisor and administrative director of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program (HRP), where she supervised summer internships and students' clinical and research projects on human rights advocacy, wrote and edited HRP publications, and served as an adviser in the visiting fellows program and for the Harvard Human Rights Journal.

Professor Green received the Yale Law School Orville Schell Center for International Human Rights fellowship and the Mark DeWolfe Howe fellowship and served as editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal at Harvard Law School, where she completed her J.D. in 1991. She received her B.A. in political science, international relations, and women's studies with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984.

She has worked on human rights cases in U.S. courts since 1990, including the groundbreaking Doe v. Karadzic, which found the leader of the Bosnian Serbs civilly liable for sexual violence, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Another important case, Doe v. Unocal, established the principle that U.S. corporations could be sued under the Alien Tort Claims Act for complicity in human rights violations. Other cases have included Doe v. Constant for Haitian women and successful actions against former leaders and officials from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, and Indonesia. Recently, a case that she initiated in 1996 in her capacity with CCR, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, was concluded with a $15.5 million settlement for the families of activists murdered in Nigeria.

She has also worked on international human rights claims, in particular, gender claims, in international fora, including amicus curiae briefs in cases before the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She has done additional advocacy work before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, other U.N. bodies, and the Inter-American human rights system.

Professor Green has worked or volunteered with numerous organizations, including providing counseling at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, representing prisoners in the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, and offering legal services at the Cambridge-area Refugee and Immigration Clinic and Harvard's Mediation Project. She drafted appeals for victims of human rights abuses through the International Commission of Jurists, Geneva, and wrote and spoke on human rights through the Free Legal Assistance Group and the Church Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines. She is a long-time member of Amnesty International and currently a legal advisor to the Center for Justice and Accountability.