Valancourt Law is the pro bono and public interest law project of Richmond, Virginia-based attorney James D. Jenkins.

James earned a B.A. with distinction in French from the University of Kansas, an M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago, and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (then ranked #16 in the nation). He attended Minnesota on a full scholarship, was on the staff of the Minnesota Journal of Global Trade, and graduated cum laude.

After law school, he practiced for a number of years in Kansas City, Missouri, including work as a Staff Attorney at Legal Aid of Western Missouri, where he served low-income and elderly clients in need of pro bono legal representation. He maintained a heavy caseload of litigation at Legal Aid, often handling several dozen cases at a time in various state and federal courts in Missouri. His work was focused mainly on consumer litigation (predatory mortgage lending, Truth-in-Lending Act, FDCPA, FCRA, Missouri Merchandising Practices Act) and bankruptcy (Chapter 7 and 13), but he also handled cases in many other areas, ranging from housing to student loan litigation to family law, as well as several appellate cases.

While practicing in Kansas City, he was also active with other pro bono work, including representing clients through the Volunteer Attorney Project and serving as a cooperating attorney with the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri (co-counseling on lawsuits in civil liberties cases in Kansas and Missouri), Lambda Legal, and Immigration Equality.

In his work at Legal Aid, James earned a reputation as a maverick, routinely taking on cases that any other lawyer would have regarded as hopeless, and usually obtaining positive outcomes for clients through victory or settlement. He has always believed strongly that every wrong has a remedy, even if it requires thinking far outside the box or resorting to unorthodox and previously untried means. For example, he successfully reopened a decades-old bankruptcy case to secure a student loan discharge for a low-income individual, saved an elderly and indigent man’s home from foreclosure using Chapter 11 bankruptcy (typically reserved for large corporations), and fought (albeit ultimately unsuccessfully) to prevent a man from being separated from his family in public housing because of his quarter-century-old criminal conviction by seeking relief under the ancient writ of audita querela.

As an appellate attorney, he has briefed and argued before the Missouri Supreme Court and the Missouri Court of Appeals, was co-counsel on a successful appeal in the D.C. Circuit, and has also filed appellate briefs in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He also practices actively on behalf of veterans in the Court of Appeals for Veterans’ Claims and represents immigrants in the Board of Immigration Appeals.

James is admitted to practice in Missouri, Washington, and Virginia and also holds limited licenses to practice pro bono in Indiana, Texas, and Vermont. In the federal courts he is admitted in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals (5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, D.C. and Federal Circuits), the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, U.S. Immigration Court, and U.S. District Court (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Western District of Missouri, Eastern and Western Districts of Wisconsin, Central District of Illinois, Eastern and Western Districts of Virginia, and Western District of New York).

These days, James's pro bono and public interest legal work is a sideline for him; his full-time occupation is as the publisher and general counsel of Valancourt Books, an award-winning small press dedicated to rediscovering and republishing important works of literature that have fallen out-of-print. Besides his publishing and legal work, James's other passion is foreign languages; he speaks French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Catalan at an advanced level and Swedish, Romanian, and Portuguese at an intermediate level, as well as possessing reading skills and basic conversational abilities in a number of others.

He lives in Richmond with his husband and their dog Bailey and cat Sue Ellen Mewing.