Professor Janel George

Janel George is an Associate Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy (REEL Policy) Clinic. Her clinical projects and research focus on the development and implementation of legislative interventions to advance racial equity in education at the local, state, and federal levels. The REEL Policy Clinic employs a range of policy strategies to address clients’ priorities, including legal and legislative research and analysis, public education, coalition-building, community education, and oral and written advocacy. The Clinic’s clients range from student-led organizations, to coalitions, to non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing racial equity in education.

Her scholarship focuses on the potential of legislative interventions to eradicate racial inequalities in education. She has written about legislative interventions to help address racial disparities related to school discipline, resource inequities, as well as the significance of the federal government’s role in helping to remedy longstanding school segregation. This work includes articles such as Stereotype and School Pushout: Race, Gender, and Discipline Disparities, 68 Ark. L. Rev. 101 (2015) and Populating the Pipeline: School Policing and the Persistence of the School-to-Prison Pipeline, 40 Nova L. Rev. 493 (2015-2016), as well as the report The Federal Role and School Integration: Brown’s Promise and Present Challenges with Linda Darling-Hammond. She employs Critical Race Theory as an approach for analyzing the reproduction of racial inequalities in education through laws and policies and examines legislative interventions to help eradicate them. She has also produced commentary that has been published in Ms., CNN, Education Week, and other outlets. Her work and scholarship are informed by her experience as a congressional staffer and as a legislative lawyer with several non-profits. She has also spoken across the country about issues of racial inequality in education, including before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Education.

George began her legal career as a Georgetown Law Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow with the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. During her fellowship, she worked on issues of immigration reform and reproductive justice. She has previously served as Senior Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she worked to reform discriminatory school discipline practices in partnership with member organizations of the Dignity in Schools Campaign. She worked with the Campaign to help to secure provisions promoting positive and inclusive school climates in the Every Student Succeeds Act. She also served as a member of the Negotiated Rulemaking Committee for the law. During her time at LDF, she also worked on other state and federal education issues. She has also worked as counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, during which time she managed a legislative portfolio that included education, health care, immigration, judiciary, and civil rights issues. Prior to joining Georgetown Law, she served as a Senior Policy Advisor with the Learning Policy Institute where she co-led the Equitable Resources and Access team and worked disseminate evidence to help inform policies to address school segregation and school finance reform.

She has served as an adjunct professor with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy where she developed and taught a seminar on racial inequality in k-12 education and with Georgetown Law where she developed and taught a seminar focused on advocating for educational equity within the federal regulatory process. She is on the Board of the Education Law Center and is a Council Member of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Section and co-chair of the Education Committee. She received her JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School where she was a managing editor of the Wisconsin Law Review and her BA from Spelman College.

Nikola Nable-Juris

Nikola Nable-Juris is the Supervising Attorney/Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic (REEL Policy Clinic). She began her legislative lawyer career with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, leading advocacy campaigns across the country to ban life-without-parole sentences for children. Working alongside formerly incarcerated youth and their family members, her efforts led to bill passage in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, and Virginia, giving hundreds of people the opportunity to return home. She also worked as a staff attorney at First Shift Justice Project with a focus on D.C.’s paid family leave benefits program and completed a Georgetown’s Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship with the Initiative on Gender Justice and Opportunity.

Nikola earned her J.D. from the University of Maryland in Baltimore and clerked for federal magistrate judges in D.C. and Maryland. After graduating with her B.A. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from the University of Virginia, she worked with pregnant and parenting youth in Juneau, Alaska, and at domestic violence shelters in both Alaska and Virginia. She is the proud parent of two elementary school students at a bilingual D.C. public school and a toddler who can’t wait to join them. In her free time, she can be found wearing a bike helmet or running shoes, trying a new recipe, reading through a stack of overdue library books, or dreaming of a future trip.

Antonio Coronado

Antonio Coronado (he/they/él/elle) is the first year Supervising Attorney/Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic (REEL Policy Clinic). They received their J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law with an interdisciplinary certificate in Poverty Law and Economic Justice. At Northeastern, they were an Associate Editor to the Northeastern University Law Review, a student attorney to the Poverty Law & Practice Clinic, and a member of the school’s Committee Against Institutional Racism.

As a genderqueer, Xicanx, and disabled educator, Antonio’s embodied knowledge of U.S. settler law is complemented by their experiences in the legal profession. During law school, Antonio was a legal researcher to the Initiative for Energy Justice. At IEJ, they supported advocates in realizing a just transition to clean energy through reparative policy proposals and a goal of community self-determination. More recently, Antonio worked as a research assistant to the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Legislative Department. There, they developed testimony in support of bills decriminalizing sex work, creating community-based alternatives to policing, and establishing safe consumption sites.

Antonio holds a B.A. and M.A. in Communication from the University of Arizona. Pedagogically, they are committed to practices of dreaming, disrupting, and radical reflection. Their work is published or forthcoming in the Northeastern University Law Review Forum, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, and Cambridge University Press.

Daniella Blake-Aranbayeva

Daniella Blake-Aranbayeva is the Office Manager for several clinical programs at Georgetown Law. She provides administrative support to the Health Justice Alliance Law Clinic, Georgetown’s DC Street Law Program, and Racial Equity in Education Law Policy Clinic. Prior to joining Georgetown Law, Daniella worked as a paralegal for an intellectual property law firm.

Daniella earned her Master’s in Public Administration and Bachelor’s degree in Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government from American University.