Janai S. Nelson joined St. John’s in 2006 and is an Assistant Professor of Law and a Senior Fellow 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. Her voting rights experience at LDF encompasses constitutional cases and actions arising under the Voting Rights Act and other federal and state statutes. 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 also been published in the two former journals, as well as in the Georgetown Law Journal, on issues involving race and the law.