Jamila Johnson (she/her/y’all) is a Senior Counsel. Jamila joined the Lawyering Project after almost a decade in private practice and nearly six years litigating the remains of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana’s criminal systems. At the Lawyering Project, Jamila is a litigator working predominately on the right to travel for abortion care, access to safe reproductive care, free speech, and reproductive justice for people in prisons. Jamila was the Deputy Director at the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), where she ran its End Plantation Prisons Project and served as Managing Attorney for its Jim Crow Jury Project. During that time she led a mass post-conviction project for those in prison with non-unanimous jury verdicts. Before that, Jamila was a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center and a shareholder at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt. She holds a law degree from the University of Washington School of Law.
Jamila is actively licensed to practice in Louisiana, Oregon, and Washington. Jamila resides in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is unreasonably enthusiastic about crawfish season.