Carol Scott Receives NOVA’s 2012 Ken Carpenter Award
NOVA’s Most Prestigious Award 
The National Organization of Veterans’ Advocates, Inc. is proud to honor Carol Scott with the prestigious Ken Carpenter Achievement Award for Excellence. This award is in recognition of a career spent in dedicated service to U.S. veterans. “Carol Scott has a long and distinguished career of advocating for veterans’ interests,” stated Mike Viterna, President of NOVA. “Her influence in this area of law has been significant and will long endure. Carol’s accomplishments are too numerous to list but perhaps her most noteworthy undertaking has been to increase awareness for our veterans who are Native Americans and heretofore have been largely excluded from the important VA benefits they have earned. Her exceptional knowledge of veterans’ law, extraordinary tenacity, selfless service and tireless efforts make her a role model for others to emulate. I am proud to call her a friend”, said Viterna in making the announcement of the award to Ms. Scott.
Carol Scott was admitted to the Florida bar in 1970 and began her career in a solo practice litigating many Selective Service and Military Law cases. Ms. Scott was appointed as a “Commissioner” at the U.S. Court of Military Appeals in 1976 where she was part of the first appellate central staff in the country. Eventually, she became the Vice-Chair of the Military Law Committee of the General Practice Section of the American Bar Association and organized a series of seminars on Military Law throughout the United States in order to enable civilian lawyers to represent military personnel who seek to exercise their statutory right to civilian counsel.
After taking a sabbatical to become a nationally-registered paramedic, Ms. Scott returned to her veterans work in 1993 when she joined a local chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). She soon met Brian Robertson of the Veterans Consortium Pro Bono Program, and became its Deputy Director. Ms. Scott has been working for the Consortium for the last 16 years.
Ms. Scott joined NOVA in 2001 where, in her words, she met a “tremendously collegial, talented, and generous lot of lawyers whose sole purpose was to serve our veterans.”
In addition, Carol Scott is the Chair of the Federal Bar Association’s (FBA) Veterans Law Section, where she has actively worked to address the specific problems facing Native American Veterans. She has reached out to the Indian Law Section and has been working to bring programs such as the Traditional Tribal Veterans Centers to the large landed reservations in the West. Currently, Carol Scott is working to integrate the concept of a Veterans Court into the implementation of the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, testifying before the Tribal Law and Order Commission in March 2012 and submitting several statements for the records to both the House and Senate Committees on Veterans Affairs and the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in furtherance of those programs.
“I have been blessed as a recipient of the President’s Award of the FBA for my dedication to Indian veterans and veterans in general, and as the recipient of the Ken Carpenter Award for 2012. I look on these incredible indicia of recognition as an incentive to keep going”.