Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq

Jonathan is a racial justice advocate, a professor at Wesleyan, and a critical scholar of structural inequity.  Previously Jonathan was a Senior Assistant District Attorney in New York where he worked on many Social Justice policy initiatives over the past four years.  Jonathan was promoted to Senior Assistant District Attorney after starting the first ever research manual of Brooklyn history of structural racism and systemic inequity from slavery to the New Deal.  He trained young prosecutors on the communities they serve and ensure justice prosecution and fairness for all.  Jonathan recently gave a 2 day seminar at the NYC Bar on criminal justice reform.
 
Jonathan has been involved in law, policy, and critical race theory for nearly a decade. Early in his career Jonathan served as an adjunct instructor at Hunter College in New York, and most recently, an Instructor at Wesleyan University in Structural Inequity and Critical Race Theory.  Jonathan has taught NYC private schools such as Lycee Francais de New York, and Prep-for-Prep, a leadership development program that offers promising students from communities of color access to private school education.
 
Jonathan won prestigious civil rights fellowships, including a Sparer Fellowship supporting his work at a leading Latino Rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Washington, D.C. where he also served on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.  
 
Jonathan is the founder of a racial justice and equity training program, Justiceology-By-Design (justiceology.com), which focuses traditional equity, inclusion, and diversity program that localizes participants with anti-racist readings and workshops and the U.S. history of laws and policy that produced structural inequity to the present in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest.
 
Jonathan is also a trained Equity By Design professional, leading anti-racist initiatives at his office and for the New York City Bar through the Criminal Courts Committee.
 
Jonathan has given talks at a number of venues including the Hispanic Heritage Month Lecture at the Hotchkiss School boarding school, the keynote lecture on Critical Race Theory and Law Today at Indiana Maurer Law School, a 2-day Seminar on Systemic Inequity and the Future of Justice at the N.Y.C. Bar, and academic conferences at: Harvard University, the William Jefferson Clinton Institute in American Studies, Dartmouth College, the inter-American cultures conference in Mexico, and  NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law.   Jonathan received his B.A. at Bowdoin and M.A. at the University of Virginia and completed PhD-level work at Rutgers University in the Institute on Race, Ethnicity and American Culture, and received a J.D. at American University Washington College of Law.
 
Jonathan has published articles, poems, and law review articles; most recently, he has two forthcoming law review articles, Black Lives Don’t Seem To Matter, Justice After George Floyd, a Critical Race Theory Shift to Systemic Inequity, Indiana Maurer School of Law Journal of Law and Social Equity, Fall Issue (2020); and Rioting by a Different Name: Hearing The Voices of the Unheard and Injustice in the Age of George Floyd a New Vision of Legal History, Iowa School of Law The Journal of Gender, Race, & Justice (2020).  Jonathan is also a published poet, and his book is titled, "The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps" a history of racial injustice in poems.