Janai Nelson is an undeniable leader for the cause of securing voting rights for all Americans. With her set to soon lead the historic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund (LDF), her influence is growing. Join the Stanford Law Review virtually and in Room 190 as we kick off our 2022 Symposium on voting rights with listening to just how Janai is thinking about this moment to fight for voting rights across the country and how lawyers can be a part of the fight. Boxed lunch will be provided afterwards to registered attendees only.

Ms. Nelson was one of the lead counsel in Veasey v. Abbott (2018), a successful federal challenge to Texas’s voter ID law. 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 where she was also a full professor of law and served on the law school’s Senior Leadership Team.

A renowned scholar of voting rights and election law, Nelson continues to produce cutting-edge scholarship on domestic and comparative election law, race, and democratic theory. Nelson’s forthcoming publication, Parsing Partisanship: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race, will appear in NYU Law Review (October 2021), and proposes an option for the Supreme Court to address hybrid racial and partisan gerrymandering claims despite its finding that partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable. Some of her past influential publications include the following: Counting Change: Ensuring an Inclusive Census for Communities of Color, 119 Colum. L. Rev. (2019), The Causal Context of Disparate Vote Denial, 54 B.C. L. Rev. 579 (2013), and The First Amendment, Equal Protection, and Felon Disfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, 64 Fl. L. Rev. 111 (2013).