Professor Jones is a full-time member of the George Washington University Law School faculty and the Supervising Attorney of the Small Business and Community Economic Development Clinic. Before joining the Law School faculty in 1988, she was a private civil and administrative law practitioner. She has held teaching positions at CUNY-Queens Law School,  where she taught lawyering skills and clinical simulations from 1985 to 1986 and courses on community economic development and economic justice as the 2004 Haywood Burns Visiting Chair in Civil Rights, at University of Maryland School of Law where in Fall 2006 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar; at American University’s Washington College of Law, where she taught legal writing; and at Antioch School of Law, where she taught in an immigration law clinic.  

Professor Jones was the 2005-06 Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education and she is currently the Chair of the AALS Section on Africa.  Professor Jones is also a past Chair of the AALS Standing Committee on Clinical Legal Education and of the AALS Section on Poverty Law.

Professor Jones has held many other leadership positions.  She is currently on the Governing Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) Forum of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law.  She is a past Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editor of the ABA Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, past co-chair of the Forum’s Legal Educators’ Practice Division, a co-founder and past co-chair of the Community Economic Development Committee of the ABA Section on Business Law, and a current member of the ABA Business Law Education Committee. Previously, she served as a member of the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty, a Fannie Mae Foundation Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2002) and a member of Leadership Washington (1996).  Currently she serves on the board of directors of several organizations including the National Center for Nonprofit Law and Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts.

Professor Jones has published numerous articles in the field of community economic development, microenterprise development and small business and she is the author of  A Legal Guide to Microenterprise Development ( ABA Publishing, 2004). She is in the process of co-editing a book (with Roger Clay, President of the Insight Center for Community Development) called Community Economic Development: A Legal Guide for Advocates, Lawyers and Policymakers which is scheduled to the published by the ABA in 2009. Her research interests also include international/comparative community economic development, nonprofit organizations and charitable giving, social entrepreneurship, minority entrepreneurship and arts and entertainment.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University and a Juris Doctor degree and Master of Arts in Teaching from Antioch School of Law.

For more information contact:

Prof. Susan Jones

202.994.7463

susanjones@law.gwu.edu