American University Washington College of Law Project Announces Launch of New Gender Jurisprudence Website

Site Houses Database of More than 26,000 Searchable Documents Issued by Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 8, 2013—The Gender Jurisprudence and International Criminal Law Project, a collaborative project between the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) and the Women and International Law Program (WILP) at American University Washington College of Law, announces the launch of a new website, www.genderjurisprudence.org.

The centerpiece of the website is the Gender Jurisprudence Collections (GJC), a powerful database containing more than 26,000 documents including judgments, decisions, orders, and other documents issued by international/ized criminal courts and tribunals. The documents are easily searchable for issues relating to sexual and gender-based violence.

Unlike online searches that generate hundreds of irrelevant decisions containing matching words, the GJC contains close to 1,700 documents that have been identified as containing gender issues and are coded for key concepts, eliminating researchers' need to sift through extraneous documents. The newly redesigned site makes searching the database even easier.

In addition to the GJC, the Project includes concise digests of select decisions and court documents highlighting key facts, allegations, and legal analyses dealing with sexual and gender-based violence with a synopsis of the gender issues, allowing researchers to quickly home in on content that is most significant.

The site also includes commentaries on select issues or cases critical to understanding developments in this area of the law by academics, practitioners, judges, prosecutors, and legal scholars with particular expertise in the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence.

In addition, the site’s blog offers a dynamic space for the international law community to engage in honest, insightful, and grounded discussions of ideas, programs, data, laws, and policies about current feminist debates within the field of international criminal law.

For more information, contact Chante Lasco, Jurisprudence Collections coordinator, American University Washington College of Law, genderjurisprudence@wcl.american.edu.

###

The Gender Jurisprudence and International Criminal Law Project is a collaborative project between the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) and the Women and International Law Program (WILP) at American University Washington College of Law. Launched with support from the Open Society Institute’s International Women’s Program, the project aims to raise awareness of and encourage research and debate about the jurisprudence emerging from international and hybrid tribunals regarding sexual and gender-based violence committed during times of conflict, mass violence, or repression and to facilitate the investigation and prosecution of these crimes at both a domestic and international level.

In 1896, American University Washington College of Law became the first law school in the country founded by women. More than 100 years since its founding, this law school community is grounded in the values of equality, diversity, and intellectual rigor. The law school's nationally and internationally recognized programs (in clinical legal education, trial advocacy, international law, and intellectual property to name a few) and dedicated faculty provide its 1700 JD, LL.M., and SJD students with the critical skills and values to have an immediate impact as students and as graduates, in Washington, DC and around the world. For more information, visit wcl.american.edu.