Janai Nelson, JD

Janai Nelson is President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization advancing racial justice and equality. Nelson has spent nearly three decades fighting for racial justice as a renowned litigator and prolific legal scholar with specific expertise in election law.  

In October 2025, Nelson argued Louisiana v. Callais before the United States Supreme Court, defending equitable congressional representation for Black voters in Louisiana and 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executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was rescinded.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, as a member of LDF’s litigation and policy teams, 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 where she was also a full professor of law and served on the law school’s Senior Leadership Team.  

Before entering academia, Nelson was a Fulbright Scholar at the Legal Resources Center in Accra, Ghana. Nelson began practicing law as the 1998 recipient of an NAACP LDF/Fried Frank Fellowship. 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 (NAWL), the Metropolitan Black Bar Association’s (MBBA) Public Servant of the Year Award, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Suffolk University Law School.