Jennifer Segal Diascro is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University.  She teaches undergraduate courses on law and politics, the American jury, media and politics, and research methods.  She teaches a graduate course on judicial politics.  She has recently co-authored a law and politics textbook (with Gregg Ivers, AU), Inside the Judicial Process: A Contemporary Reader in Law, Politics and Courts (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006). 

Professor Diascro’s research focuses on the politics of the judiciary and includes work on political representation on the federal district bench, the mass media and the Supreme Court, public opinion and the Court, and federal sentencing.  She is co-author of Television and the Supreme Court: All the News That's Fit to Air (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and is the author of several articles published in Political Research Quarterly, Judicature, American Review of Politics, and the Federal Sentencing Reporter.  Professor Diascro is also author of  “Public Education for Men Only: United States v. Virginia (1996)” in Creating Constitutional Change: Clashes over Power and Liberty in the Supreme Court (University of Virginia Press, 2004), and coauthor of “Judicial Elections in the News” in Running for Judge (New York University Press, forthcoming).

Professor Diascro is the Faculty Advisor for political science doctoral students in the Department of Government.  She also serves on the editorial board of the Law and Courts Book Review.  

Before coming to American University in 2002, Professor Diascro was on the faculty of  the Department of Political Science at the University of Kentucky, where she was promoted with tenure in 2001.  Additionally, she was selected by the Supreme Court Fellows Commission to be the 2000-2001 Judicial Fellow at the U.S. Sentencing Commission in Washington D.C.  She graduated Cum Laude from the University of California at San Diego with a BA in Political Science in 1990, and earned her doctorate in political science from The Ohio State University in 1995.