Janai S. Nelson joined St. John’s in 2006 and is an Assistant
Professor of Law and the Assistant Director of the Ronald H. Brown
Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development. In addition
to conducting research on election law and voting rights issues,
she teaches the following courses: Election Law and Political
Participation, Voting Rights Seminar, and Professional
Responsibility. In the year before she joined St. John’s,
Professor Nelson was a Fulbright Scholar at the Legal Resources
Center in Accra, Ghana, where she researched the political
disfranchisement of persons with criminal convictions and what it
portends for the advancement of democracy in Ghana.Prior to
receiving the Fulbright award, Professor Nelson was the Director of
Political Participation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, Inc., where she oversaw all voting related litigation and
matters, litigated voting rights and redistricting cases, and
worked on criminal justice issues on behalf of African Americans
and other under-served communities. At LDF, she argued en
banc before the Second Circuit and served as lead counsel in
Hayden v. Pataki, a felon disfranchisement case that
challenges New York State laws that deny the right to vote to
people who are incarcerated and on parole for a felony
conviction. She was also part of the team of civil rights
attorneys representing African- and Haitian-American voters in
NAACP v. Hood (the class action suit that arose out of the
2000 general elections) and one of the counsel representing the
death row inmate whose sentence was commuted in 2003 by the U.S.
Supreme Court in Banks v. Dretke.
Professor Nelson began practicing law as a litigation associate
at the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson and
was the 1998 recipient of the NAACP LDF/Fried Frank
Fellowship. She received a B.A. from New York University in
1993 and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law in 1996. Upon
graduating from law school, Professor Nelson clerked for the
Honorable Theodore McMillian on the United States Court of Appeals
for the Eighth Circuit (1997-1998) and the Honorable David H. Coar
on the United States District Court for the Northern District of
Illinois (1996-1997). While in law school, she served as
Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review, Consulting Editor
of the National Black Law Journal, and Associate Editor of
the UCLA Women's Law Journal. She has been
published in the two former journals, as well as in the
Georgetown Law Journal, on issues involving race and the
law. Professor Nelson has also appeared on CNN as an election
law expert and regularly speaks at conferences and symposium
nationwide.