Georgetown Law

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.

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. 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 also managed other state and federal education policy issues and worked to help 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. As Legislative Counsel on Capitol Hill, she managed a legislative portfolio that included education, health care, immigration, judiciary, and civil rights issues. She has co-authored reports on Black girls and education, magnet schools, and the federal role and integration. She has published articles about the School-to-Prison Pipeline impacting students of color and policy interventions to help eliminate it. Prior to joining Georgetown, 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 issues, including school segregation and school finance reform.

She has served as an adjunct professor with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy where she taught a self-designed seminar on racial inequality in k-12 education and with Georgetown Law where she taught a self-designed seminar focused on advocating for educational equity within the federal regulatory process. 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.