Janai Nelson is President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. As the institutional thought-leader, she directs the organization’s programmatic strategy and operations. Throughout her career, she has played a pivotal role in numerous landmark legal cases, shaping the fight for civil rights.
In October 2025, Nelson argued Louisiana v. Callais before the United States Supreme Court. This landmark voting rights case aims to secure equitable Congressional representation for Black voters in Louisiana and defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nelson was also one of the lead counsels in Veasey v. Abbott (2018), a successful federal challenge to Texas’s voter ID law, and the lead architect of NUL v. Trump (2020), which sought to declare the Trump administration’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was rescinded.
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 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, where she was also a full professor of law.
A renowned scholar of voting rights and election law, Nelson has produced 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,” published in the Columbia Law Review, 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. Nelson regularly speaks as a civil rights, constitutional law, and election law expert in the media, and at conferences and symposia nationwide. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights and a Trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Nelson’s leadership has been recognized nationally, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Root 100, the New York University Distinguished Alumni Award, the M. Ashley Dickerson Diversity Award from the National Association of Women Lawyers, the Metropolitan Black Bar Association’s Public Servant of the Year Award, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Suffolk University Law School.
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