Civil rights leader, attorney, and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill will address graduates at the 2025 University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law hooding ceremony on May 23.
Ifill is the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard University School of Law, where she is the founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Previously, she served as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). From 1993 to 2013, she was a member of the Maryland Carey Law faculty.
In her 20 years at Maryland Carey Law, she taught courses including Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law, as well as various seminars. She also launched several Legal Theory and Practice courses and clinics, including co-founding one of the earliest clinics in the United States focused on challenging legal barriers to formerly incarcerated individuals as they reenter their communities.
Her scholarship, teaching, and advocacy while at Maryland Carey Law focused on issues including environmental justice, voting rights, the interconnections between civil rights and the criminal legal system, judicial diversity and impartiality, and reparations. While on the Maryland Carey Law faculty, she wrote her highly acclaimed book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, which laid the foundation for current conversations about lynching and reconciliation.
Ifill departed the faculty in 2013 to become president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. During her nine years leading LDF, she made remarkable progress expanding and deepening its work across multiple areas of civil rights law.
As the head of LDF, she also returned to Maryland Carey Law following Freddie Gray’s 2015 death while in police custody to co-host with the law school and then-Congressman Elijah Cummings ’76 a town hall bringing together city residents and attorneys from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). People packed into Westminster Hall to discuss DOJ's findings that the Baltimore Police Department was consistently violating the constitutional rights of Baltimore’s Black residents. DOJ attorneys then used what they heard to negotiate the consent decree, which is still in effect, between the federal government, the BPD, and the City of Baltimore.
In 2022, Ifill joined the faculty at Howard Law School to found the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. The center is a hub for research, curriculum development, and for convening people across disciplines to talk about the values of the 14th Amendment and how to infuse those values into American institutions.
She also recently served as a Ford Foundation Fellow, as the Klinsky Visiting Professor for Leadership & Progress at Harvard Law School, and as a fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.
Ifill is a graduate of Vassar College and earned her JD from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and many of the most prestigious medals in the legal profession, including the Radcliffe Medal, the Brandeis Medal, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, and The Gold Medal from the New York State Bar Association. Ifill was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2021.