Georgetown Law

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

Her scholarship focuses on the potential of legislative interventions to eradicate racial inequality in education. She has written about legislative interventions to help address racial disparities related to school discipline and resource equity, as well as the significance of the federal role in helping to remedy longstanding school segregation. This scholarship is informed by her experience as a congressional staffer and as a legislative lawyer with several non-profits.

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.