Valencia Richardson

Valencia Richardson is a voting rights litigator who has spent her entire year organizing, and then litigating, democracy, elections, voting, and the rule of law. In addition to serving as an adjunct, Ms. Richardson serves as Senior Legal Counsel, Voting Rights at the Campaign Legal Center. Prior to joining Campaign Legal Center, Ms. Richardson was a voting rights organizer and activist. Before law school, Ms. Richardson was a Fulbright grantee to Mexico and a student voting rights organizer for the Andrew Goodman Foundation, where she served as a board member. She is the author of a nonfiction book, “Young and Disaffected,” and published “Voting While Poor: Reviving the Twenty-Fourth
Amendment and Eliminating the Modern-Day Poll Tax” in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy. Ms. Richardson is an expert on youth and student voting, having written on the topic extensively and starting her career as an organizer around student voting.

Ms. Richardson's work focuses primarily on advancing the freedom to vote in the Deep South, especially among marginalized communities. Ms. Richardson has litigated various voting rights cases in state and federal court, including Pettaway v. Galveston County, VOTE v. Landry, League of Women Voters of Louisiana v. Landry, VOTE v. State, Alabama NAACP v. Marshall, Tennessee NAACP v. Lee and countless other voting and redistricting cases in the South and across the country. Ms. Richardson also works on developing state voting rights acts and litigated Aguilar v. Yakima County — the first case litigated under the Washington Voting Rights Act.

Ms. Richardson is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center (J.D. 2020) and Louisiana State University (B.A. 2016). She is admitted to practice law in the United States Supreme Court, the District of Columbia, State of Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third, Fifth, Sixth, Eleventh Circuits, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, and the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. Valencia Richardson joined CLC in August 2020 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow, where her work focused on local-level compliance with federal voting laws in the Deep South.