Jennifer Trahan

Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs. She teaches: International Law; Human Rights; International Justice; Transitional Justice; U.S. Use of Force & the “Global War on Terror”; a field intensive on Justice in the former Yugoslavia, which travels to Bosnia, Serbia and The Hague; and a field intensive to Rwanda. She has served as counsel and of counsel to the International Justice Program of Human Rights Watch; Iraq Prosecutions Consultant to the International Center of Transitional Justice; and worked on cases before the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
She is the author of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: A Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (HRW 2010), and Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: A Topical Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (HRW 2006). The latter book was released by Universidad Iberoamericana in Spanish, and her earlier books have been translated by the UNDP into Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, and by Human Rights Watch into French. She is also the author of several book chapters and numerous law reviews, including “Why the Killing in Darfur is Genocide” and “The Rome Statute’s Amendment on the Crime of Aggression: Negotiations at the Kampala Review Conference,” as well as several articles about the work of the Iraqi High Tribunal. She has also attended the International Criminal Court’s Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression, and the International Criminal Court’s Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. She is Chairperson of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Criminal Court Committee, and a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Task Force on National Security and the Rule of Law, as well as the International Law Association’s Committee on Use of Force. She has also taught at Columbia University, Fordham Law School, Brooklyn Law School, The New School, and lectures at Salzburg Law School’s Summer Institute on International Criminal Law.

Prior to entering the field of international law, she spent 10 years in private practice as a litigator at the New York City law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP. She holds an A.B. from Amherst College, a J.D. from N.Y.U. School of Law and an LL.M from Columbia Law School, specializing in international law.