Professor Jocelyn Benson joined the Wayne State University Law School faculty in 2005, after serving as a law clerk to Judge Damon J. Keith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She previously worked for the Democratic National Committee as the National Field Director for Election Protection during the 2004 presidential election, organizing and developing a program that trained and placed over 17,000 volunteer lawyers in precincts throughout the nation. She is currently serving as a member of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law.
Professor Benson graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College, where she founded the now-annual Women American Political Activism conference and was the first student to be elected to serve in the governing body for the town of Wellesley, the Town Meeting. She subsequently earned her Masters in Sociology as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, conducting research into the sociological implications of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.
She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was a general editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. During her time at Harvard Law, Professor Benson also worked as the Voting Rights Policy Coordinator for the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a non-profit organization that seeks to link academic research to civil rights advocacy efforts.
Professor Benson has also worked as a summer associate for voting rights and election law for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. She served as a legal assistant to Nina Totenberg at National Public Radio, and as an investigative journalist for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL.