Sherrilyn Ifill: A Look at the Civil Rights Lawyer’s Career

Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer, advocate, and author best known for her role as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). In 2020, Glamour named her one of its Women of the Year and The American Lawyer recognized her as the Attorney of the Year. Time named her one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2021, the same year she joined President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court.

After graduating from the New York University School of Law in 1987, Ifill began her legal career as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The next year, she became a litigator at LDF, fighting to protect voting rights for five years. Ifill left LDF in 1993 to become a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, where she taught for more than two decades. In 2013, Ifill returned to LDF, this time to lead the organization as its seventh director-counsel and the second woman to hold that position.

Thurgood Marshall established the LDF in 1940 as an independent legal branch of the NAACP. Soon after, Marshall and the LDF brought the Brown v. Board of Education case to the Supreme Court. Under Ifill’s leadership, the LDF expanded. She brought the organization into the spotlight with media appearances, a strong Twitter presence, and partnerships with organizations like Color of Change. These are some of the high-profile cases that LDF has litigated under Ifill:

• Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016): In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an affirmative action admissions process at the University of Texas. The case went back to court in 2015 and was upheld again in 2016.
• NAACP LDF v. Donald J. Trump (2017): In July 2017, the LDF filed one of several lawsuits against President Trump in response to his Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity. The suit alleged that the committee “was formed with the intent to discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Constitution.” President Trump disbanded the committee in January 2018.
• NAACP LDF v. Barr (2020): In 2020, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice violated multiple requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The LDF alleged that the Commission’s purpose was “to support President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s unfounded claims that there is lack of respect for law enforcement across the United States due to recent efforts to reform the criminal justice system.” The court forced the commission to halt operations until it met the conditions of FACA.
• NAACP v. United States Postal Service (2020): In 2020, the LDF, the NAACP, and Public Citizen filed a lawsuit against the United States Postal Service (USPS) that alleged disruptions in mail delivery caused disenfranchisement to mail-in voters. As a result, the court ordered the USPS to expedite the delivery of vote-by-mail ballots.

Sherrilyn Ifill is the author of two books on the legal system and racism.

• On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century (2007): Ifill’s first book takes a closer look at some of the 5,000 lynchings that occurred in the United States from 1890–1960 and provides a path to healing through a restorative justice framework. Now a popular textbook for college students, On the Courthouse Lawn was revised and republished in 2018.
• A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law (2018): This wide-ranging book tackles important issues of civil rights, based on a conversation between Ifill and former United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, and NYU Law professor Anthony C. Thompson.

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