Janai S. Nelson
President & Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Janai S. Nelson is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). As an organizational thought-leader at LDF, Ms. Nelson determines and executes LDF’s strategic vision and oversees the operation of its programs. A member of LDF’s litigation and policy teams. Ms. Nelson’s extensive civil rights law experience includes expertise as a voting rights and election law scholar, serving as one of the lead counsel in Veasey v. Abbott (2018), a federal challenge to Texas’s voter ID law, hair discrimination advocacy, and testifying before Congress multiple times on issues ranging from voting rights and election law to discriminatory practices and procedures administered by TSA.Prior to joining LDF in June 2014, Ms. 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 where she is also a full professor of law. Ms. Nelson received the 2013 Derrick A. Bell Award from the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Minority Groups and was named one of Lawyers of Color’s 50 Under 50 minority professors making an impact in legal education. Prior to joining St. John's faculty, Ms. Nelson was a Fulbright Scholar at the Legal Resources Center in Accra, Ghana. She began practicing law as the 1998 recipient of the NAACP LDF/Fried Frank Fellowship, following federal district and appellate court clerkships. Ms. Nelson later became Director of LDF’s Political Participation Group, overseeing all voting related litigation and matters, litigating voting rights and redistricting cases, and working on criminal justice issues. Ms. Nelson has published scholarship in leading law reviews and writes for popular press. She has appeared in various media as an expert on race, civil rights, constitutional law and election law, and regularly speaks at conferences and symposia nationwide. She is a graduate of New York University and received her J.D. from UCLA School of Law.