Jyoti Nanda

Bio

Jyoti Nanda studies criminal and juvenile law with a focus on how legal actors, institutions, and doctrines have responded or failed to respond to the dramatic expansion of the carceral state. In 2022, GGU awarded her the Justice Jesse W. Carter Faculty Scholarship Award for her commitment to impactful and cutting-edge scholarship. She is interested in the intersections of criminal law and social hierarchies shaped by race, age, gender, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and immigration. Her research draws on her background in Ethnic Studies and her experience as a youth advocate and civil rights lawyer to better understand contemporary legal practices within the historical context of racial and economic inequality in the United States. Nanda’s 2012 article Blind Discretion: Girls of Color in the Delinquency System served as the framework for a national report on the adultification of girls of color in our criminal justice system.  She has written on how race functions to ascribe and criminalize disability within the special education context in over-policed and over-surveilled schools. In 2022, she published a ground-breaking paper on the flaws of juvenile probation, arguing that it is a deceptive system leading youth deeper into the criminal system.

Nanda is currently the American Bar Association’s nominated Reporter for the forthcoming ABA Juvenile Justice National Standards. She is the principal investigator with the Vera Institute and the African American Policy Forum on the Girls/Gender Non-Confirming Youth Research Project. The Project seeks to support ending the incarceration of pregnant youth and all girls in L.A. County and beyond. She also launched Youth Justice Navigator, a project working with system-impacted youth to create a web-based application that helps educate and empower youth and their families to navigate the complexities of carceral systems. Her articles have been published in the UCLA Law Review, Columbia Journal of Race & Law, Nevada Law Journal, Lewis & Clark Law Review, and the Disability Law Journal. Her research and writing appear in the national press in print, T.V., and radio, and she has received numerous awards for her work. In addition, Nanda teaches Criminal Law, Professional Responsibility, Youth & Justice, Rebellious Lawyering, and Problem Solving in Public Interest.

Before joining the GGU Law faculty in 2019, she spent 16 years teaching at UCLA Law as part of Critical Race Studies and Public Interest Law Programs, where she co-taught a course with Distinguished Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. In addition, for five years, she founded and ran UCLA’s Youth & Justice Clinic to train and empower law/social work students to holistically enforce the unmet educational rights of children in juvenile criminal cases with the goal of diversion. Nanda began her career as a Skadden Fellow and civil rights attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational, Fund. Inc. (LDF). She is a graduate of Northwestern Law and U.C. Berkeley. Born in Nairobi, she is a proud immigrant and the daughter of parents who were refugees and immigrants from Pakistan/India, and Kenya. Nanda considers herself a scholar, teacher, and lawyer-activist.