Jyoti Nanda

Jyoti Nanda, Professor of Law at Golden Gate University (GGU), 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. In Spring 2023, she was a Visiting Professor at U.C. College of Law, San Francisco (formerly “Hastings”) and taught Critical Race Theory. Nanda will teach Race, Racism and U.S. Law at USC in Fall 2023, and be a Visiting Professor at U.C. Davis Law School in Spring 2024.