Jyoti Nanda

Jyoti Nanda is an associate professor of Law at Golden Gate University (GGU) School of Law, where she teaches criminal law, professional responsibility, and juvenile law. Her writing seeks to address where the law fails to protect communities impacted by mass incarceration at the intersection of gender, race, disability, education, and juvenile justice. She has written most recently on the adultification of girls of color in our criminal justice system, how race functions to ascribe and criminalize disability within the special education context in overpoliced and over-surveilled schools, and juvenile probation. Nanda is the American Bar Association (ABA) nominated reporter for the forthcoming ABA Juvenile Justice National Standards, and her research and writing has been featured in national press in print, television, and radio.

Prior to joining GGU Law in 2019, she taught at UCLA Law for 16 years, where she founded and ran the Youth & Justice Clinic, which teaches law students how to represent youth and assert their unmet education and disability rights in juvenile criminal cases. Nanda began her career as a Skadden Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational, Fund. Inc. She was educated at Northwestern Law in the Children and Family Justice Center, and in the Ethnic Studies and Rhetoric departments at the University of California, 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.