Ary is an education policy leader with school funding and resource equity experience spanning federal and state government, advocacy, and the law. Ary served in President Obama’s Administration as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Education; on the Biden-Harris Transition Team; and worked as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill. In Maryland, she served as the Chief of Staff at the State Department of Education and as an education advisor on Governor Wes Moore’s transition team. As Vice President for P12 Policy, Research, and Practice at The Education Trust, she and her team supported advocacy coalitions in 14 states while producing original data and policy analysis, and she served as an expert witness in a school funding lawsuit in Delaware.

Saba is an attorney with almost twenty years of experience in the education field. She grew up in Hillsborough County, Fl (Tampa) and attended some of the district’s most prestigious public schools as an out-of-boundary student. Saba went on to attend Stanford University and Harvard Law School.

She started her career in education as a teacher at Sousa Middle School in Washington, DC. Saba has worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Center for American Progress, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, and Education Counsel. She served as a member of the senior political staff at the Department of Education during the Obama Administration, including two years as senior counsel in the Office for Civil Rights.

Saba was most recently a partner at a national civil rights law firm and was appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser to serve five years on the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board. Saba has been named by the National Law Journal as one of Washington, DC’s Rising Stars. The Profiles in Diversity Journal also recognized her among its Women Worth Watching in Leadership and as a Black Leader Worth Watching. Saba was recently named a Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Employment Lawyer and recognized on the National Black Lawyers Top 100 list. 

Tona Boyd joined the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in January 2023 as the Associate Director-Counsel, where she works in partnership with LDF’s eighth President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson and LDF’s senior leadership team to set and execute the strategic direction of the organization’s legal programs, operations, and administration. Boyd most recently served as Special Counsel and Special Assistant to the President in the White House Counsel’s Office in the Biden-Harris Administration, where she worked to advance President Biden’s agenda related to racial justice, equity, and judicial nominations. As a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, she provided legal advice to the President and executive agencies, led policy development on criminal justice reform, including policing, sentencing, clemency, drug policy, and community violence intervention, as well as civil rights – including hate crimes and domestic terrorism. As a senior member of the judicial nominations team, Boyd supported the selection, preparation, and confirmation of federal judicial nominees, including D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as the full slate of the United States Sentencing Commission appointees. During the time Boyd served on the judicial nominations team, President Biden nominated, and the Senate confirmed, a historic number of federal judges of unprecedented diversity.

Prior to joining the Biden-Harris administration, Boyd was Chief Counsel and Senior Legal Advisor to United States Senator Cory A. Booker on the Senate Judiciary Committee. There, she led a team responsible for providing the Senator with legal and political analysis of issues related to criminal justice, racial justice, civil rights, immigration, antitrust, intellectual property, privacy and technology, firearms, constitutional law, and judicial and executive nominations. Boyd worked closely with Senator Booker and other lawmakers to draft and negotiate the Justice in Policing Act, which outlined an agenda for modernizing policing and set forth a framework for greater law enforcement accountability. 

Boyd began her legal career as a litigator in the Honors Program of the United States Department of Justice. She served for nearly a decade as a federal civil rights prosecutor in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, where she investigated and prosecuted complex criminal conspiracy cases involving law enforcement brutality and obstruction. Boyd graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Political Science and Spanish and a minor in Peace Studies. While at Notre Dame, she was named the Alumni Association Distinguished Undergraduate of the Year and received the Yarrow Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement in Peace Studies. She later received the Notre Dame Black Alumni Exemplar Award. Boyd has been profiled in national and local publications, including Essence where she was featured for her role in assisting the confirmation of the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. 

Andrew Brennen is a proud Kentuckian who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and furthered his education at Harvard University with a Master of Education in Education Policy & Management.

In high school, Andrew co-founded the Kentucky Student Voice Team, which amplifies and elevates students as partners in creating more just and democratic public schools.  Throughout Andrew’s time in North Carolina, and with the help of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, he served as a defendant-intervenor in the affirmative action case Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Andrew is a first-year law student at Columbia University and as an NAACP LDF Marshall Motley Scholar, he is committed to practicing civil rights law in the South for at least 8 years after graduation. 

Gina is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD), which is led by the Poverty and Race Research Action Council.

A native of Denver, CO, Gina graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and Howard University School of Law in Washington, DC. Prior to law school, she worked as a Residential Instructor at the SEED Public Charter School of Washington, DC. She later interned at the Office of Human Rights for the City of Alexandria, VA where she handled employment discrimination claims.

Gina led the staff of Education Action, a small (and no longer active) nonprofit spearheaded by author and activist Jonathan Kozol. Education Action assisted teachers, parents, students, and organizers in becoming actively engaged in education reform. In June of 2008, she began coordinating the school and neighborhood integration efforts of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School (CHHIRJ) and four other national civil rights organizations. From 2010-2011, Gina was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. There, she was primarily involved with the Ford Secondary Education and Racial Justice Collaborative. This project engaged social justice leaders and education practitioners in the education policy development process.

She served as a member of the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC), one of many advisory councils that contribute to the development of education policy in Massachusetts, from 2009-2014. She also belongs to TAG Boston, a network of educators in the Boston metropolitan area who are committed to social justice and racial equity, which she helped launch. 

Janel George is an Associate Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic (“REEL Policy Clinic”). The Clinic engages law students in legislative lawyering work on behalf of clients to address issues of racial inequality in public education. Her work and scholarship focus on racial stratification and inequality in U.S. education and legislative and policy interventions to help address it.

She has written about the resegregation of public schools, discriminatory school discipline practices, Critical Race Theory, and resource equity. As a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), she worked with several campaigns and coalitions to leverage legislative and policy advocacy to advance equal educational opportunity. She has served as Legislative Counsel in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, during which time her legislative portfolio included child welfare, civil rights, health care, and education issues. 

Preston Green is a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut and the John and Maria Neag Professor of Urban Education at the Neag School. At the University of Connecticut, Dr. Green helped develop the UCAPP Law Program, which enables participants to obtain a law degree and school administrator certification at the same time. Dr. Green also developed the School Law Online Graduate Certificate, a 12-credit online program that helps educators, administrators and policy makers understand the legal dimension of K-12 education.

Before coming to the University of Connecticut, he was the Harry Lawrence Batschelet II Chair Professor of Educational Administration at Penn State, where he was also a professor of education and law and the program coordinator of Penn State’s educational leadership program. In addition, Dr. Green was the creator of Penn State’s joint degree program in law and education. Further, he ran the Law and Education Institute at Penn State, a professional development program that teaches, administrators, and attorneys about educational law.

Dr. Green has written five books and numerous articles and book chapters pertaining to educational law. He primarily focuses on the legal and policy issues pertaining to educational access and school choice. 

Introducing an 18-year-old scholar who is making waves with her musical talents! She's a gifted singer and songwriter, exploring various genres with a special passion for classical music. Not only does she excel in the world of music, but she's also an active member of 'The Real Young Prodigy's,' a dynamic hip-hop activist group. With her intelligence and creativity, she's using her voice to inspire change and make a difference. 

Jin Hee Lee is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF).  In this role, she leads the Department of Strategic Initiatives, which houses specific projects and campaigns that integrate litigation, policy, organizing, communications, research, and public education to provide impactful, community-centered advocacy for Black communities.  Ms. Lee also led LDF’s representation of a multi-racial coalition of 25 Harvard student and alumni organizations, which served as amici curiae in both the trial and appellate levels in the affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. As counsel for the student and alumni organizations, Ms. Lee presented oral argument to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in the Harvard case. 980 F.3d 157 (1st. Cir. 2020). 

Ms. Lee is a 1995 graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, magna cum laude, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. She graduated from Columbia Law School in 2000 and served as law clerk to Judge Martha Vázquez in the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico. In 2016, Ms. Lee was recognized by Columbia Law School as the Distinguished Public Interest Graduate of the Year. 

Damon T. Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Hewitt has more than 20 years of civil rights litigation and policy experience, including prior leadership roles in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors. Formerly, as executive vice president at the national Lawyers’ Committee, he coordinated the organization’s strategic, programmatic, and operational efforts to advance the fight for racial justice.

Prior to joining the national Lawyers’ Committee, Hewitt was the inaugural executive director of the Executives’ Alliance for Boys and Men of Color—a philanthropic network of more than three dozen national and local foundation presidents focused on shifting policies, structures, and the false narratives that negatively impact our nation’s sons and brothers. Through his leadership, the Alliance helped incubate, coordinate, and launch more than $200 million in collaborative grantmaking efforts on issues ranging from police accountability to college completion. He was also the chief liaison from the philanthropic community to the White House on policy issues impacting young men of color.  Hewitt previously worked as a Senior Advisor at the Open Society Foundations and for over a decade as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 

Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. From 2013-2022, she served as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. She recently served as a Ford Foundation Fellow and as the Klinsky Visiting Professor for Leadership & Progress at Howard Law School. Ifill is currently the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School Ifill where later this year she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Ifill holds a fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ifill’s tenure at the helm of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was widely praised for elevating the profile, voice and influence of the organization, and for expanding and deepening its work across multiple areas of civil rights law. Ifill’s voice and analysis played a prominent role in shaping our national conversation about race and civil rights during a tumultuous period of racial reckoning in our country. Her strategic vision and counsel remains highly sought after from leaders in government, business, law, grassroots organizations, and academia.

Ifill began her legal career as a Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, before joining the staff of the LDF as an Assistant Counsel, where she litigated voting rights cases in the south. In 1993 Ifill left LDF to join the faculty at University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore where she taught for twenty years before rejoining LDF in 2013 as its President & Director-Counsel.

Ifill is a scholar whose work has appeared in leading law journals, periodicals, and the nation’s leading newspapers. Her book ON THE COURTHOUSE LAWN: CONFRONTING THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY, was highly acclaimed, and is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reconciliation. She is currently completing a new book about race and the current crisis in American democracy entitled, “Is This America?” which will be published by Penguin Press.

Ifill is a graduate of Vassar College and earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2021. Ifill is a recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Brandeis Medal, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, and The Gold Medal from the New York State Bar Association. 

Olatunde Johnson is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg’ 59 Professor of Law at Columbia Law School where she teaches, writes, and provides public commentary about antidiscrimination law, administrative law, courts, democracy, and inequality in the United States.  She directs Columbia's Constitutional Democracy Initiative and co-directs the Center on Constitutional Governance at Columbia Law School.   In 2021, she served on the White House Commission on the Supreme Court.

In 2023, she received a Columbia University service award for her collaboration on the podcast "Through the Gale" about the role of lawyers after the pandemic and protests of 2020, and for organizing the "Beyond the Casebook" introduction discussion series on inclusive democracy. She has received several awards for her teaching and service including the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and Columbia Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. Prior to academia, Professor Johnson served as constitutional and civil rights counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Johnson graduated from Yale University and from Stanford Law School. After law school, she clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the United States Supreme Court. 

Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta is a Senior Researcher with LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. Her research focuses on the public health consequences of criminalization and the impacts of criminal legal responses to violence. Dr. Kajeepeta was formerly a research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice where she worked on advancing local jail decarceration efforts. Prior to that, she served as the Director of Research and Evaluation at the NYC Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence where she led the city’s research agenda for gender-based violence prevention. Dr. Kajeepeta holds a PhD in epidemiology from Columbia University, a MS in epidemiology from Harvard University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Michigan. Her research and writing have been featured in the American Journal of Public Health, Lancet Public Health, the New York Times, New York Daily News, and Rolling Stone magazine. 

Robert Kim, Esq. is the executive director of the Education Law Center, a legal advocacy organization dedicated to advancing and protecting public education and the rights of public-school students nationwide. In 2020, he served as a member of the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team. From 2011 through 2016, he served in the Obama Administration as deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, which enforces federal civil rights laws in K-12 and postsecondary institutions nationwide. Earlier in his career, Kim served as a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association and as a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. His most recent publications include Education and the Law, 6th ed. (West Academic Publishing, 2024) and Elevating Equity and Justice: Ten U.S. Supreme Court Cases Every Teacher Should Know (Heinemann, 2020). 

Hamida serves as Senior Policy Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. While at LDF, Hamida has worked on issues of economic and environmental justice, currently serves on the Georgia voting rights team and leads LDF’s education policy work.

Before joining LDF, Hamida was National Advocacy and Policy Counsel for the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, an integrated advocacy campaign focused on reducing the prison population by 50 percent and ending racism in the criminal justice system. In this capacity, she led efforts to end mass incarceration across the Deep South before focusing on probation, parole and reentry reform nationwide. Prior to the ACLU, Hamida led state and local campaigns to advance educational equity policies in Georgia and Louisiana, and worked on the 2012 reelection campaign for President Barack Obama in Ohio.

Hamida is a proud graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Kentucky College of Law, where she served as senior staff editor for the Kentucky Journal on Equine, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Law and studied international human rights in the London Law Consortium. During law school, she clerked for the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

Stefan Lallinger is the executive director of Next100, a think tank that centers the voices of those closest to and most impacted by policy. Next100 recruits exceptional candidates with a diverse array of experiences in education, immigration, criminal justice, climate change, and other issue areas for two-year, full-time fellowships as policy entrepreneurs in New York City, where they conduct original research and pursue a policy agenda.

Dr. Lallinger is also a senior fellow on The Century Foundation’s K-12 Education team, where he is a strategic advisor to the Bridges Collaborative. He researches and writes on issues of racial and socioeconomic integration, equity, affirmative action, selective public schools, school governance, and district–charter relations. As the first director of the Bridges Collaborative, he recruited more than fifty school districts and housing organizations that collectively serve more than 3 million students and families to join the inaugural Bridges cohort of leaders combating segregation in schools and neighborhoods.  Dr. Lallinger also teaches courses on policy and desegregation at American University.

Dr. Lallinger previously worked as a special assistant to Chancellor Richard Carranza in the New York City Department of Education working on agency policy and strategy. He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he studied integration and school district leadership. He holds BAs in political science and development studies from Brown University, an MA in history from the University of New Orleans, and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard University. 

James S. Liebman is an expert on institutional design and change in public education and criminal justice. He is the founder of the Columbia Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL). He has argued five capital and habeas corpus appeals in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and many others in lower federal and state courts. He has also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Administration of Justice about the need for improved legal representation in state capital trials and revisions to federal habeas corpus law, respectively.

From 2006 to 2009, Liebman led the New York City Department of Education’s Division of Accountability and Achievement Resources under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  New York City awarded Liebman the 2009 Overall Excellence in Technology Award for his design of the city’s educational data system.  Liebman served as a law clerk to Judge Carl McGowan of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from 1977 to 1978 and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens the following year. From 1979 to 1985, he was assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Liebman joined the Law School’s faculty in 1985. 

Bennett M. Lunn is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in legal philosophy and education policy where he was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar for his commitment to public service. Before law school, Bennett worked at the U.S. Department of Education as a Truman-Albright Fellow, helping create programs to address pandemic learning loss.

At Columbia, Bennett is President of the Education Law and Policy Society and an Essays Editor for the Columbia Law Review. He has assisted in legal research on the role of public schools in republican government and the impact of Brown on meaningful educational opportunity. Bennett has served as a student consultant with the Center for Public Research and Leadership and interned with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, ACLU South Carolina, and the Center for Educational Equity.

A Samvid Scholar and Justice John Paul Stevens Fellow, Bennett hopes to spend his career fighting for equitable access to education, strengthening democratic institutions, and building more inclusive communities. 

Cara McClellan GEd’12 is the Founding Director and Practice Associate Professor of the Advocacy for Racial and Civil (ARC) Justice Clinic, which provides students with hands-on experience working in civil rights litigation and policy advocacy around systemic racism.

Prior to this she served as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., where her work focused on increasing education equity and ending the criminalization of Black people. She gained litigation experience as the lead counsel on several cases, including I.S. et al. v. Binghamton School District, a case challenging a school’s discriminatory strip search of four Black and Latina middle school girls, and Smith v. City of Philadelphia, challenging the Philadelphia Police Department’s indiscriminate use of military-style weapons against protesters, residents, and bystanders in a predominately Black West Philadelphia community. McClellan has also represented students and families in school desegregation cases, such as Sheff v. O’Neill, and students and alumni as amici in SFFA v. Harvard, defending Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policy.

She is a frequent media commentator on issues of civil rights and education policy and has provided on-air and in-print commentary for NBC Nightly News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, HLN, Education Week, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her opinion writing has appeared in The Hill and The Baltimore Sun. 

Commissioner McKissick was nominated to serve on the North Carolina Utilities Commission by Governor Roy Cooper for a six-year term commencing July 1, 2019, and expiring June 30, 2025. His nomination was confirmed by the NC Senate and the NC House. Prior to his appointment to the NCUC, he served as a member of the North Carolina Senate for approximately 13 years, where he served as the Senior Deputy Democratic Leader. 

Commissioner McKissick is the son of the late civil rights leader and attorney, Floyd B. McKissick, Sr.

He received an A.B. Degree in Geography from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; a master’s degree in Regional Planning (MRP) from UNC-Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University, and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) Degree from the Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina.

He has practiced law since 1984 with several law firms, including Dickstein Shapiro & Morin in Washington, D.C., as well as Faison, Brown, Fletcher & Brough in Durham, North Carolina. He established a practice known as McKissick & McKissick in 1990, where he specialized in Civil Litigation. He has represented Fortune 500 corporations, as well as small businesses and many individuals during the course of his career.

He is a member of the following committees through the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC): Consumers and the Public Interest, Electricity, Critical Infrastructure, International Relations and Energy Resources and the Environment. He serves as Chair of the Committee for Consumers and the Public Interest. He is also Co-Chair of NARUC’s NASEO Advanced Nuclear State Collaborative. He is President of the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (SEARUC). Commissioner McKissick has moderated panels at conferences sponsored by NARUC, SEARUC, as well as the New Mexico State University Center for Public Utilities, where he is a member of their Advisory Council. 

Anthony J. Mejia is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School. He earned his B.S. in Psychology and Philosophy with pre-law emphasis from Santa Clara University. Prior to law school, Anthony worked at two different nonprofits serving the immigrant community. First, through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps as a legal assistant at Erie Neighborhood House in Chicago, then as a paralegal with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington in Silver Spring, MD.

Currently, Anthony is a Max Berger '71 Public Interest/Public Service Fellow and a Columbia Law School Racial Justice Fellow. He also serves as the Public Interest co-chair of the Latinx Law Students Association, the Vice President of the Society for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Staff Editor for the CLS Journal of Law and Social Problems, and as a student attorney in the Immigrants' Rights Clinic. Upon graduation Anthony will pursue a career at the intersection of public defense and immigration. He hopes to dedicate his career to serving the immigrant community ensnared in the criminal legal system and more broadly contributing to dismantling systems that systematically harm communities of color. 

Janai Nelson 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. Nelson previously served as Associate Director-Counsel and 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. Nelson was one of the lead counsel 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 President Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was later rescinded. 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-time 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 publication, Parsing Partisanship: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race, appeared 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. She also published Counting Change: Ensuring an Inclusive Census for Communities of Color, 119 Colum. L. Rev. (2019). Nelson has taught courses in Election Law and Political Participation, Comparative Election Law, Voting Rights, Professional Responsibility, and Constitutional Law and a seminar on Racial Equity Strategies, in addition to guest lecturing at law schools around the country. Nelson is also the recipient of 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.

Nelson began practicing law as the 1998 recipient of an NAACP LDF/Fried Frank Fellowship. She received a B.A. from New York University and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law where she served as Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review, Consulting Editor of the National Black Law Journal, and Associate Editor of the UCLA Women’s Law Journal. She has been published in popular news outlets and platforms, including The Guardian, L.A. Times, Reuters, Huffington Post, and Blavity. Nelson has also appeared on nearly every major broadcast news outlet, including CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, as well as local, alternative, and social media platforms. Nelson regularly speaks as a civil rights, constitutional law, and election law expert at conferences and symposia nationwide and has been listed in multiple venues as a suggested candidate for the federal judiciary. 

Raymond C. Pierce serves as the President and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, where he leads the organization’s historic mission of advancing educational opportunities for African American and low-income students in the southern states. Since joining SEF in January 2018, Pierce has focused the organization on research, policy, advocacy, and leadership development. Under his leadership, SEF has successfully launched initiatives in early childhood education, education innovation, and an intensified re-examination of school desegregation. Pierce has also led SEF’s engagement with the U.S. Department of Education in managing the Equity Assistance Center-South.

Prior to joining SEF, Pierce served as Dean of the School of Law at North Carolina Central University. Earlier, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights as a political appointee in the administration of President Bill Clinton. During that time, Pierce also served on the White House Domestic Policy Council working group in the development of the Empowerment Zones and related economic and workforce development policies.  He began his career as a civil rights attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the John W. Walker Law Firm.

Pierce currently serves on the Board of Visitors of the School of Education at Howard University and the Board of Advisors of the National Student Support Accelerator, and he is a permanent member of the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference. He is also Visiting Professor of Public Policy and Political Theology at the Duke University Divinity School.

Pierce earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Syracuse University, where he also received an officer’s commission in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and a master’s degree from the Duke University Divinity School. 

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Columbia Law School

Malik Sammons is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from The Ohio State University where he focused on inequality and justice as well as democracy and the law. Prior to law school, Malik worked as a legislative intern for U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (OH) within the office’s civil rights and housing team and as an AmeriCorps VISTA for YouthBuild – a nonprofit focused on the education, workforce development and support of young adults whose high school education was disrupted.

Currently, Malik is a Max Berger ‘71 Public Interest/Public Service Fellow at Columbia; a program designed for the empowerment and professional development of public interest-focused students to equip a new generation of advocates. He also serves as the Black Law Student Association's (BLSA) Public Interest Chair, an Articles Editor for the Columbia Journal for Race and Law, an Anti-Racism Grantmaking Program Fellow and a student attorney in the Community Advocacy Lab. Upon graduation Malik hopes to assist communities that are under attack from the systemic mechanisms in place which perpetuate the multitude of ways segregation harms Black and Brown communities.  

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As Director of Litigation, Sam leads LDF’s racial justice litigation docket across the organization’s four historic pillars: education, economic justice, criminal justice, and political participation. He maintains an active docket of his own cases, including several high-profile criminal justice, voting rights, and education matters. He is lead counsel in NAACP v. USPS, in which LDF and our co-counsel Public Citizen secured a historic injunction requiring that the United States Postal Service implement “Extraordinary Measures” to ensure the timely delivery of ballots in advance of the 2020 election. In Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education, Sam was among the LDF attorneys who persuaded the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that a small city in Jefferson County, Alabama was motivated by racial discrimination in seeking to secede from the racially diverse county school district.

A recognized expert in death penalty litigation, Sam represented LDF-client Duane Buck in Buck v. Davis, in which the Supreme Court held that Mr. Buck’s constitutional rights were violated when his appointed trial counsel presented an “expert” who falsely testified that Mr. Buck was more likely to commit future acts of criminal violence because he is Black. Outside of the courtroom, Sam has testified before Congress about the need for new voting rights legislation, and he is a frequent participant on panels at conferences for legal academics and practitioners. He is an expert on the Supreme Court and is often called upon to provide analysis about pending and prospective cases, as well as matters relating to the appropriate role of the Court in our constitutional democracy.

Susan Sturm is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on advancing racial equity and full participation in educational, legal, and cultural institutions; lawyering and leadership, reimagining justice institutions, and the role of law in advancing institutional and social change. Professor Sturm collaborates with a wide variety of higher education, artistic, government, criminal justice, and community-based organizations and networks involved in organizational and culture change, leadership development, supporting the leadership of directly affected communities, building equitable institutions, and increasing full participation in higher education. She is the author of forthcoming book, to be published by Princeton University Press, entitled Transformative Tensions: Confronting Racism to Remake Our Institutions.  She has served as the Vice President and Director of Policy for the Tony award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and co-creator with BAC of Theater of Change:  Reimagining Justice, a highly acclaimed course offered at Columbia Law School. Professor Sturm is also the co-designer of a course on Lawyer Leadership: Leading Self, Leading Others, Leading Change and Breakthrough in Abolition Through Transformative Learning Exchange. She is the architect and creator of the Centering Change Skills Hub, an online platform aimed at cultivating leadership and building the capacity to address race in law schools, court systems, and communities. She currently serves as the principal investigator on grants for the Paralegal Pathways Initiative, which received the Clifford Chance Racial Justice Award, and a grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to address race and bias in the Massachusetts Trial Courts. She is the recipient of the College Partner Award from College Initiative and Hudson Link,  and the Presidential Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University.