Kayla Vinson (she/her) is a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is a member of the Southern Regional Office, and her work focuses on supporting liberatory movements and organizers across the South. Kayla is interested in undoing all forms of domination so that we might build an otherwise world. 

Before coming to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Kayla was the inaugural Executive Director of the Law and Racial Justice Center at Yale Law School, where she led efforts to address systemic racism through local racial justice projects guided by New Haven residents and supported by Yale students and staff. She also taught a course on racial power and the law to Yale undergraduates. Before working at Yale, she was an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, where her docket included appellate and post-conviction legal representation, reentry support, memory work on the legacy of racial injustice in the United States, curriculum development for middle and high schools, and research and writing about the function of white supremacy in the criminal legal system. In a previous life, she was a K-12 educator and worked to create and support liberatory educational settings. She is currently a board member for the Pretrial Justice Institute. 

Her writing has appeared on The Marshall Project and in the New York Times.

Kayla is a graduate of New York University School of Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar. She also holds degrees in African American Studies and Sociology from Yale College, Secondary Education from the University of Pennsylvania (M.S.Ed), and Policy Affairs from Princeton University (M.P.A.).