Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. From 2013-22, she served as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. Since then, Ifill has served as a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation, a fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and as the Klinsky Visiting Professor for Leadership & Progress at Harvard Law School. She is currently the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, where she founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy.
Ifill began her legal career as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, before joining the staff of the LDF as an assistant counsel, where she litigated voting rights cases in the South. In 1993, Ifill left LDF to join the faculty at University of Maryland School of Law, where she taught for twenty years before rejoining LDF in 2013 as its president & director-counsel.
Ifill’s scholarly work has appeared in prominent law journals, periodicals, and newspapers. Her book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy Of Lynching in the 21st Century is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reconciliation. She is currently completing a new book about race and the current crisis in American democracy entitled Is This America?, which will be published by Penguin Press.
Ifill is a graduate of Vassar College and earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and accolades in higher education, including the Radcliffe Medal, Brandeis Medal, Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion, Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, and the Gold Medal from the New York State Bar Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and, in 2021, was named by TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She serves on the boards of the Mellon Foundation, New York University School of Law, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
