Biography
With considerable practice experience involving national-security regulation as well as employment and religious-liberty litigation, Professor Jones pursues a scholarly agenda critiquing legal remedies for various kinds of discrimination as derived from the fundamental law. He also evaluates the legal profession’s moderating function amid the clashing of groups’ interests. His recent publications have appeared in the Widener Journal of Law, Economics & Race, the Georgia State University Law Review, and the North Carolina Law Review. During the 2014 and 2016 U.S. election cycles, he was quoted as an authority on counterespionage regulations and foreign intercourse in The New York Times, National Review, The Times of Israel and Gawker.
Professor Jones has presented before leading law audiences on four continents, including at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky in the United States and Monash University (Australia), Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia/South America), Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany/Europe), and the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) abroad.
A public-interest advocate, Professor Jones has advised Republic of Georgia scholar-practitioners on liberty provisions of the constitution framed after that country’s Rose Revolution of 2003. In 2012, he delivered expert testimony during the Budget Oversight Hearings for the District of Columbia’s Office and Commission on Human Rights, critiquing enforcement practices before former mayor Marion Barry, Chair of the council’s Committee on Aging and Community Affairs. Professor Jones’s televised testimony informed the D.C. Attorney General’s bringing of charges in late 2013 against a Section 8 management company that had improperly barred a Bible study group from a Methodist-related seniors’ housing complex near the White House. In 2014, Professor Jones won a unanimous, 7-0 First Amendment case of first impression at the Kentucky Supreme Court, which had granted discretionary review in a racial discrimination/ministerial exception case highlighting tensions between enforcement of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment’s religious-freedom clauses. In 2015 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, he briefed the ongoing case of a disabled veteran female schoolteacher on Fort Campbell Appellant, arguing that the federal government’s widely invoked “by-passes” of preference-eligible veterans in filling competitive jobs are unconstitutional abrogations of the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998. Other matters on which Professor Jones consults involve institutions and companies accused by particular groups of illegally discriminating based on age, gender, national origin, race, and/or religion.
Professor Jones was rated in 2017 by Super Lawyers as a Washington, D.C., Rising Star, placing him among the top 2.7% of lawyers under the age of 40 in Washington, D.C. In 2016, he was ranked as a Top 40 Black Lawyer under 40 by another national attorney-rating organization.
Before serving for six years as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Law at Campbell University in North Carolina, Professor Jones served in 2010-11 as Visiting Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at North Carolina Central University, in Durham. He previously had practiced for three years in the international trade and commercial litigation groups of Bryan Cave LLP in Washington, D.C., where he developed unique expertise on the growing reach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 and related national-security regulations. Prior to entering the legal profession, he was a journalist for Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers including The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, and The (Westchester County, New York) Journal News. He played viola professionally with the Charlotte Philharmonic Orchestra in its 2000-01 season.
Professor Jones graduated with honors in Political Science from Emory University, where he studied on Robert W. Woodruff and National Merit scholarships and was named a 1999 Harry S. Truman Scholar and a member of USA Today’s year 2000 All-USA College Academic First Team, competitively ranked as one of the country’s top twenty students. He later earned the Master of Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as an Executive Editor of both the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal and the Harvard Human Rights Journal. While at Harvard, he was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, on which he spent his first year out of law school as a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Australia’s University of Melbourne. There, he studied the development of Bills of Rights in the Australian setting and served as a Resident Tutor in Baptist-affiliated Whitley College.
Professor Jones served from 2012 to 2014 as Vice Chair of Campbell Law’s Faculty Recruitment Committee and in 2013-14 as Chair of the Committee on Community, Diversity and Student Life. In 2014-15, he chaired the ad hoc Law Review Evaluation Committee.
In Fall 2015, Professor Jones served dually as Associate Professor of Law at Campbell University and as Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford in England, studying ecclesiastical courts of Britain’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while developing The Jones Professional Responsibility Heuristic. The heuristic is an approach to global concerns of corporate responsibility and diversity that shapes policies and practices determined to be “relentlessly realistic and effective, rather than politically correct but impotent.”
An ordained Baptist deacon, Professor Jones serves on the Board of Directors of The Academy of Preachers. He is a Trustee of the Rotary Club of Federal City Foundation and is a former Resident Trustee of International House New York. He serves as President of the Veterans Employment Advancement Foundation, a non-profit charity based in Alexandria, Va.
Professor Jones is admitted in the District of Columbia and before the Supreme Court of the United States as well as five other federal courts.