Meghan Phillips

About

Meghan Phillips is from a military family and after her father’s deployment to Iraq, she developed a desire to one day work in diplomacy and international affairs.  To pursue this calling, she attended the University of Notre Dame where she majored in Political Science and French and wrote a senior thesis on the integration of immigrants in France. During her junior year, she studied abroad at Sciences-Po in Paris, France, where she took comparative politics and international relations classes in French. After graduation in 2011, and before starting law school at William and Mary in 2013, she worked with the Victim/Witness Division of Ohio’s Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office.  In this role, she would travel to area hospitals to meet survivors of sexual assault to provide them with support and information during their forensic exam. She also volunteered with the Miami Valley’s Catholic Social Services’ Refugee Resettlement division where she assisted with immigration paperwork, data entry, and donation tracking. Her work with the Prosecutor’s office and the Refugee Resettlement division  lead to the realization that her abstract hope to work in foreign policy needed some concrete knowledge that only an education in law, particularly on the subjects of international, immigration, and asylum law could provide. She therefore decided to pursue her law degree at William and Mary. She hopes to focus her legal studies on international human rights law, immigration, and asylum.       

This summer, Meghan will be assisting with PASSOP’s mission to fight for the legal rights of asylum-seekers, refugees, and immigrants in South Africa.  As she is bilingual in French, she hopes to use her language skills to help refugees from the DRC and other francophone countries in Africa.