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. 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 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 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executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was later rescinded.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 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. 

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Executive Director of its Center of Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. She is also the Distinguished Professor and Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a social justice think tank dedicated to racial justice, gender equality and human rights.

Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” the latter a term she coined to describe the ways in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. Her studies, writing, and activism have identified key issues in the perpetuation of inequality, including violence against Black women and the overcriminalization of Black girls. Crenshaw and AAPF launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014 to call attention to police violence against Black women and girls and Crenshaw authored #SayHerName: Black Women's Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, which documented and drew attention to the killing of Black women and girls by police. She is also the co-author of Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. 
 

Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. She is a founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. In 1991, she assisted on the legal team of Anita Hill during her testimony at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Crenshaw provides commentary for media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC and NPR, and hosts the podcast "Intersectionality Matters!”
 

Crenshaw is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received lifetime achievement awards from the Association of American Law Schools, Planned Parenthood, and the ERA Coalition. She has been awarded the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women's Section of the Association of American Law Schools and most recently, Crenshaw was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.  

In addition to frequent speaking engagements, training sessions, and town halls, Crenshaw has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality was influential in the drafting of the equality provisions in the South African Constitution. She authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001, served as the rapporteur for the conference’s expert group on gender and race discrimination.

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the Director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. A graduate of Harvard (AB summa cum laude), Oxford (MSc as a Rhodes Scholar) and Yale (JD), he specializes in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature. He received tenure at Yale Law School, where he served as Deputy Dean before moving to NYU.

Yoshino has published in major academic journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. He has also written for more popular forums, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Yoshino is the author of three books. His fourth book (co-authored with David Glasgow), Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice, was published by Simon and Schuster in February 2023.

Yoshino has served as the President of the Harvard Board of Overseers. He currently serves on the Board of the Brennan Center for Justice, on advisory boards for diversity and inclusion for Morgan Stanley and Charter Communications, and on the board of his children’s school. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, including the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the Senior Peck Medal in jurisprudence, and the New York University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Manhattan with his husband, two children, and a Great Dane.