Elaine Chiu (she/her)
Director

Professor Elaine Chiu is a first-generation legal scholar-teacher and a passionate advocate for systemic change. She has been on the St. John’s Law faculty for more than two decades and is committed to its almost 100-year mission of providing access to the legal profession.

From 2014 to 2022, Professor Chiu led the school’s Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and managed its premier pre-law diversity pipeline program, the Ron Brown Prep Program. The Prep Program helped close to 300 students rise to become law firm partners, public defenders, corporate leaders, and law professors. Continuing her work with outstanding pre-law pipeline programs, Professor Chiu currently serve on the Board of Directors and Advisory Council of the Sonia & Celina Sotomayor Judicial Internship Program.

Prior to joining the St. John's Law faculty, Professor Chiu was a Research Fellow at Columbia Law School, a Climenko-Thayer Fellow at Harvard Law School, and an adjunct professor at Cardozo Law School. She served for five years as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan. Professor Chiu is a first-generation college student and a cum laude graduate of Cornell University. She earned her J.D. at Columbia University School of Law, where she was a Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.