Sherrilyn Ifill (born December 17,1962) is an American lawyer and the Vernon E. Jordan,Jr.,Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights (Vernon E. Jordan) at Howard University. She is a law professor and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.[1] She was the Legal Defense Fund's seventh president since Thurgood Marshall founded the organization in 1940. Ifill is a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection.[2] In 2021,Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual Time 100 list. In 2025,she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[3]
While in law school,Ifill interned for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. the first summer and at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights the second summer.[2] Her first job out of law school was a one-year fellowship with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.[9] She then served as assistant counsel at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund,litigating Voting Rights Act cases including the landmark Houston Lawyers' Association v. Attorney General of Texas.[9] In 1993,she joined the faculty of the University of Maryland Law School,where she taught for two decades.[10][11] She is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn:Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century,[12][13] a 2008 finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.[14] In 2013,she became the Legal Defense Fund's president and director-counsel.[15] She is the Steven and Maureen Klinsky Visiting Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School,2023-2024.[16]
Ifill regularly appears in the media for her expertise on topics like affirmative action,[17][18] policing,[19] judicial nominees,[20] and the Supreme Court.[21] Ifill has announced that she will step down from the role of president and director-counsel in the spring of 2022,to be replaced by Janai Nelson,currently the associate director-counsel at LDF.[22] She joined the Ford Foundation as a Senior Fellow in June 2022.[23] Her writing appears in The New York Review of Books,Salon,The Washington Post,and The New York Times.[24][25][26][27][28]
In June 2023,Ifill was appointed Howard Law School's inaugural Vernon E. Jordan,Jr.,Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights. In 2024,she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law &Democracy.[29][30]
Personal life
Ifill is married to Ivo Knobloch.[5] They have three children.[4]
Honors and awards
In 2016,Ifill won the Society of American Law Teachers Great Teacher Award.[31]
Ifill was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow in 2019.[32] In 2020,Glamour magazine gave her a Woman of the Year award,calling her a "civil rights superhero."[33] In 2021,Ifill was included on the Time 100,Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[34]
She was selected as the New York State Bar Association 2023 Gold Medal Award recipient,which cited her history as a "tireless warrior for civil rights".[35]
↑ "Closing Statements" (interview with Sherrilyn Ifill). NYU Law Magazine. 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2020.
↑ Levy, Peter B. "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century." The Journal of Southern History 75.2 (2009): 474.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
