Jessie Ginsburg
Adjunct Professor
WCL Adjunct Faculty
Bio
Jessie is currently the Director of Professional Development for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She has served as an Adjunct Professor at the Washington College of Law in the externship program since 2022. She previously served as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the externship program from 2000-2013, and in the Legal Methods Program from 1990-1994. Jessie began her DOJ career through the Honors Program in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, where she investigated and prosecuted criminal civil rights violations throughout the United States. Among her significant federal trials were the racially motivated assault of an interracial couple by a group of skinheads in Des Moines, Iowa; the firebombing of an African American family’s rowhouse outside Baltimore, Maryland; and a police captain’s abuse of arrestees with a stun gun in Doraville, Georgia. Jessie also served for ten years as a deputy chief in the Criminal Section. As the Director of Professional Development, Jessie leads the Civil Rights Division’s program to train both new and experienced staff in the Civil Rights Division. She also coordinates training on civil rights issues and skill development with the Department’s Office of Legal Education and the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina. During her career, Jessie participated in detail assignments to the misdemeanor trial section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia; the District of Columbia City Council’s Judiciary Committee; and the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Office of Multilateral Affairs, and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Jessie was born and raised in New York City. She graduated from Princeton University, received a Master’s degree from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, and obtained her law degree from the University of Virginia. She clerked for Hon. Robert I. Richter on the D.C. Superior Court.
