About Us

Rebecca Epstein is the Executive Director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. She has over 20 years’ experience in litigation and policy development, and she has maintained a special focus on race and sex discrimination and the policies and practices that support marginalized girls. Rebecca is the lead author of Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, and the co-author of The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story (2015). She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Girls @ the Margin National Alliance and the Advisory Board of Alliance 4 Girls, the Incorrigibles Project, and The Art of Yoga Project.

Previously, Rebecca served as a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Rebecca graduated with honors from Brown University and received her J.D. from New York University School of Law. She clerked for the Honorable Raymond A. Jackson in the Eastern District of Virginia, and is a member of the District of Columbia, New York, and Supreme Court Bars.

Dr. Jamilia Blake is a Senior Scholar at the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, and an Associate Professor in Educational Psychology. Dr. Blake’s research examines the developmental trajectory of peer-directed aggression bullying, and victimization in socially marginalized youth and racial/ethnic disparities in school discipline. Dr. Blake has published studies examining the social and psychological consequences of aggression and victimization for African-American girls and students with disabilities and the disparate impact of school discipline for African-American girls. She is author to more than 40 publications. Her work on the inequitable discipline experiences of Black girls has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, on NPR, and CBS. She is the co-PI of a federally funded grant to examine the relation between school discipline and disproportionate minority contact in juvenile justice centers for immigrant youth. Dr. Blake is the co-editor of the American Psychological Association book, Psychological Assessment and Intervention for Ethnic Minority Children, and is the lead researcher for the Center’s report, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. In her role as a Senior Scholar at the Center, Dr. Blake is continuing to explore the perception of Black girls’ innocence and stereotype-based experiences.