Having graduated with a BCL from UCD, Jennifer was awarded an open postgraduate scholarship while completing her LLM by research. She was then awarded an internship with the Federal Defender Programme in Chicago, after which she worked as a legal researcher in the Office of the Attorney General and as a legal researcher for the Law Reform Commission before beginning work at UL in 2004. Jennifer was President of the Irish Association of Law Teachers for 20092010. She completed a graduate diploma in Academic Practice at UL and won the Small Group Teaching Award at UL in 2010. She was awarded a National Award for Excellence in Teaching by the National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning in 2011 and was a finalist for the European Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2012.
Jennifer’s research interests lie in the areas of hate crime and reproductive justice, and she has published widely on these topics. Her work in the area of hate crime looks at the criminalisation of bias motivation and explores the potential of introducing hate crime offences in an Irish context. She is co-editor of two major collections in the area of hate crime with Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan, and has published in the Journal of Hate Studies, the Oxford Handbook Online in Criminology and Criminal Justice, the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly and the Irish Jurist. She is co-director of the International Network for Hate Studies. She is also founder and co-director of the UL-based Hate and Hostility Research Group, the only academic research group in Ireland dedicated to exploring and understanding hate crime in an Irish context. Her work in the area of hate crime with Dr Amanda Haynes has been funded by the Irish Research Council, the EU DG Justice programme, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
The effort to eradicate hate requires the active participation of every component of our society, to include governments, the private sector, communities of faith and indeed every aspect of civil society. There is no more urgent task in front of us. The organizers of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit are doing the United States and the world an enormous service by tackling hatred and extremism with a focus on honest dialogue and conversation, genuine learning and practical solutions. This will not happen overnight, but the Pittsburgh community’s leadership in this effort is genuinely inspiring and motivating.
