Susan R. Jones

Susan R. Jones is a Professor of Clinical Law and a member of the full-time faculty at The George Washington University Law School. Since 1988 she has been Director and Supervising Attorney of the Small Business & Community Economic Development Clinic (SBCED Clinic). She is an active member of the District of Columbia Bar having served as Vice-Chair to the DC Bar (CED) Pro Bono Project Advisory Committee. She was a 2006 Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and in 2003–2004 she was the Haywood Burns Visiting Chair in Civil Rights at the City University of New York School of Law at Queens College.

Professor Jones was the 2006 chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education and she served on the executive committee of that section and as chair of the Section on Africa. She was a member of the AALS Standing Committee on Clinical Legal Education and is a former chair of the AALS Section on Poverty Law.  (She also served on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills and as co-chair of the Transactional Clinics Committee of the AALS Clinical Section.)

In addition to her work with the AALS, Professor Jones has held numerous leadership positions in the American Bar Association (ABA) (including vice-chair of the Economic Justice Committee, Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice,) service on the governing committee of ABA Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, editor-in-chief and senior editor of the ABA Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law and co-chair of the Forum’s Legal Educators’ Practice Division. She is a co-founder and past co-chair of the Community Economic Development Committee of the ABA Section on Business Law and she served on the ABA Business Law Education Committee as well as on the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty.

Professor Jones is a Fannie Mae Foundation Fellow, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government (2002) and a member of Leadership Washington (1996).

Her scholarly pursuits include numerous published articles in the field of entrepreneurship and the law, small and microbusiness and community economic development.) She is the author of A Legal Guide to Microenterprise Development (ABA Publishing) and co-editor of Building Healthy Communities: A Guide to Community Economic Development for Advocates, Lawyers and Policymakers. Professor Jones was awarded Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for distinctive service to the greater Washington, D.C. creative community and for 20 years of service on the WALA Board of Directors. In addition to her scholarly and practical work in transactional law, small business, community economic development, microenterprise development, and social entrepreneurship, Professor Jones has research interests in community economic development, international/comparative community economic development, nonprofit organizations and charitable giving, minority entrepreneurship, arts and entertainment, and the creative economy and social entrepreneurship.

Publications

Education

BA, Brandeis University; JD, MA, Antioch School of Law