Janai Nelson

Janai Nelson [she/her] is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation's premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. Throughout her career, she has played a pivotal role in numerous landmark legal cases, shaping the fight for civil rights.

Nelson formerly served as associate director-counsel and as a member of LDF's litigation and policy teams. She has also served as interim director of LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute and in various other leadership capacities at LDF. Prior to joining LDF in June 2014, Nelson was associate dean for faculty scholarship and associate director of the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John's University School of Law.

A renowned scholar of voting rights and election law, Janai Nelson produces cutting-edge research on election law, race, and democratic theory. Her article Parsing Partisanship: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race—which appeared in NYU Law Review—explores how the Supreme Court could address hybrid racial and partisan gerrymandering claims. In Counting Change: Ensuring an Inclusive Census for Communities of Color, 119 Colum. L. Rev., she advocates for representational equality in the Census to ensure all U.S. residents are counted and served. Nelson has taught courses on election law, voting rights, constitutional law, and racial equity strategies, while also guest lecturing at law schools nationwide.

Prior to entering academia, Nelson was a Fulbright Scholar at the Legal Resources Center in Accra, Ghana, where she researched the political disenfranchisement of persons with criminal convictions and the advancement of democracy in Ghana. Before receiving the Fulbright award, Nelson was the director of LDF's Political Participation Group, 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 underserved communities.

A graduate of NYU and UCLA School of Law, Nelson clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Theodore McMillian and U.S. District Judge David H. Coar. She has appeared widely in the media, sharing her expertise on civil rights and election law, and is a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.