Charisma X. Howell is a legal educator and scholar whose work explores how intentionally designed classrooms can develop legal reasoning and professional judgment in law students while expanding access to legal knowledge and meaningful engagement with law in the communities they teach. Her scholarship examines how structured teaching and experiential learning build the intellectual habits legal practice requires and how the law can serve as a tool for civic empowerment and community engagement.

Professor Howell directs Georgetown’s Street Law program, the original street law program in the world and a model for experiential legal education since 1972. Each year, the program places Georgetown Law students in District of Columbia public and charter high schools, where they teach practical law and facilitate dialogue-based classrooms reaching 600 to 800 high school students annually. Through a year-long practicum, Georgetown Law students develop core lawyering skills including communication across difference, reflective and responsive facilitation, adaptability, and the ability to explain complex ideas clearly to non-lawyer audiences.

Her forthcoming article, The Classroom as Democratic Laboratory: Paulo Freire, the Banking Model, and the Foundations of Critical Citizenship, examines how intentional sequencing and dialogue prepare students to interpret, question, and apply legal concepts. She is also co-author of Teach by Not Teaching: Learner-Centered Law School Clinical Supervision, published in A Global Handbook of Interactive Models of Clinical Legal Education.

Before returning to Georgetown, Professor Howell served as Deputy Executive Director and Legal Counsel of the District of Columbia’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, where she worked with justice agencies on policies at the intersection of justice, education, and community outcomes. She previously served as policy counsel for an education advocacy organization.

Professor Howell began her legal career with the California Innocence Project, later worked with the Honorable John A. Houston of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, and went on to the San Diego County Office of the Public Defender. While participating in the Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy’s Trial Skills Academy, she was named Best Advocate despite being the only student among 75 practicing attorneys.

For two decades, Professor Howell has taught interactive, learner-centered methodologies to legal professionals, educators, policymakers, and community stakeholders in more than a dozen countries across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. She has served on the faculty of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy since 2010.

Professor Howell earned her LL.M. in Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center, her J.D. from California Western School of Law where she completed an accelerated program and received multiple American Jurisprudence Awards, and her B.S. in Business Management from Arizona State University.