Sara Niles

Before becoming a Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University Law School, Sara L. Niles was a Senior Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she enforced federal civil rights statutes, including the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. During her twenty-one years in the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Ms. Niles investigated, litigated, and resolved numerous fair housing and fair lending matters for which she earned several performance awards, including Special Commendation Awards and the Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award. Ms. Niles was the Coordinator of the Division’s Combatting Redlining Initiative and was the lead trial attorney responsible for having developed and settled numerous fair lending cases, including those involving Trident Mortgage Company and City National Bank, which are among the largest redlining settlements in the Department’s history. Other recent fair housing cases involved racial steering, refusal to rent to families with children, and failure to provide housing that is accessible to people with disabilities. In recent years, Ms. Niles presented on behalf of the Division at conferences and trainings directed towards banking and mortgage lending industry actors, as well as other Federal Bank Regulatory Agencies regarding fair lending issues.  As a Division Ethics Officer, she also regularly provided ethics advice and considered clearance requests, as well as developed and presented Division wide ethics trainings multiple times per year. In 2024, Ms. Niles was detailed to the Department’s Office of Legal Policy, where she assisted with the vetting of candidates for federal judgeships and worked with the White House Counsel’s Office in preparing those candidates for confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee for the Judiciary.

Prior to joining the Division’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Ms. Niles worked to enforce both the National Labor Relations Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act first as a Field Attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, and then as a Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s Employment Litigation Section. She also served as a Special United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where she helped prosecute criminal matters.

Ms. Niles earned her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and graduated with a JD and MA in International Relations from Boston University.