Jennifer S. Hendricks
Associate Professor of Law
B.A., 1993, Swarthmore College
J.D., 1998, Harvard University
Jennifer Hendricks
Courses Taught
- Civil Procedure
- Complex Litigation
- Law and Gender
- Constitutional Law
- Advanced Constitutional Law
About
Jennifer Hendricks teaches and writes about gender, constitutional family law, and federalism. The main focus of her current work is the law’s response to sex differences, especially pregnancy. Her article Essentially a Mother, proposing a relationship model for pregnancy, won Honorable Mention in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition in 2007. Her most recent work in this area, developing the relationship model as a woman-centered basis for a theory of reproductive rights, appears in the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review and in an international collection of feminist constitutional theory forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Professor Hendricks has also written about topics ranging from preemption of tort claims to reform of the electoral college.
Before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee College of Law, Professor Hendricks received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard; clerked on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; and practiced law in Helena, Montana, where she specialized in constitutional, employment, and discrimination cases. In her practice, she successfully challenged illegal voter-redistricting and vote-counting, helped high school girls win equal sports opportunities, won access to government documents for reporters and private citizens, and defended several newspapers and ESPN against defamation claims. She also represented victims of harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation.
While at Harvard, Professor Hendricks served as a research assistant for Professor Laurence Tribe and taught legal reasoning and analysis. Her third-year paper on the Violence Against Women Act won the Notre Dame Feminist Jurisprudence Prize. She received her B.A. with honors in mathematics and women’s studies from Swarthmore College.