Tiffany Yang is an assistant professor of law at Maryland Carey Law. Her teaching and scholarship interests stem from her experiences as a civil rights lawyer. She writes about procedural barriers to civil rights protections, the inequities of law, and social change. Her work, which situates the law within broader histories of community organizing and movement building, often interrogates these inquiries through the lens of prisoners’ rights litigation. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, and Washington Law Review.
Prior to joining Maryland Carey Law, Professor Yang was a supervising attorney and teaching fellow with Georgetown’s Appellate Litigation Clinic. She trained third-year law students on client-centered appellate advocacy as they pursued civil rights, immigration, and habeas appeals before federal circuit courts. She entered academia after working as a senior attorney at the Advancement Project, where she engaged in movement lawyering in support of abolitionist campaigns, and after completing a Skadden Fellowship with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. She has litigated federal class actions and appeals to protect the rights of incarcerated people seeking release during the COVID-19 pandemic, youth suffering constitutional violations in immigration detention, formerly-incarcerated people experiencing collateral consequences of their contact with the criminal punishment system, and workers combatting sex-based hostile work environments. Her litigation has been covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Appeal, and Mother Jones.
Professor Yang graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern California. She obtained her law degree from Stanford Law School, where she received the Lisa M. Schnitzer Memorial Scholarship for her commitment to public interest lawyering. She also received a Hilmer Oehlmann, Jr. Award, two Thelton E. Henderson Prizes, and three Gerald Gunther Prizes for her doctrinal and clinical coursework. Following graduation, she clerked for Judge Josephine L. Staton on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and for Judge Andre M. Davis on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.