Jelani Hayes will be presenting: TBD

Jelani Hayes is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and is pursuing a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her dissertation, “Home & State: The Making of the Modern Family Regulation System, 1954 – 1997,” interrogates the development of foster care and child protective services in the United States. Her intellectual home is in carceral studies, and she is broadly interested in U.S. history, constitutional and administrative law, Black political thought, and critical feminisms.

Jelani holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and is a member of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia. At Yale Law School, Jelani served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism; as a research assistant for Professor James Forman Jr.’s latest book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change; and as a teaching assistant for Professor Harold H. Koh’s Civil Procedure course. After graduating from Yale Law School in May 2023, Jelani served as a law clerk at the National Association of Social Workers Legal Defense Fund.

Jelani currently holds the title of senior consultant at a boutique political strategy firm where she supports research, law, and policy projects for organizational clients advancing reproductive rights, gender justice, and democratic reform. Jelani is the Graduate Student Representative for the American Society for Legal History, and she previously served as the Student Fellow for the Harvard Law School Program in Law & History. Jelani received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and she is a proud Southern California native.