Sherrilyn Ifill, a prominent civil rights attorney and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is joining the faculty of Howard University School of Law to start a law and democracy program, the university said on Wednesday.
Ifill will launch a new center focused on the 14th amendment, which guarantees “equal protection under the laws,” and will teach a seminar on the subject at Howard after she spends the fall semester as a distinguished professor of practice at Harvard Law School.
She will be Howard Law’s inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights, named for the civil rights activist and lawyer who died in 2021 at age 85. Jordan graduated from Howard Law in 1960 before spending nearly four decades as a lawyer and lobbyist at law firm Akin Gump and counseling multiple presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Ifill stepped down from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2022 after leading the organization for nine years. Prior to that, she was on the faculty of the University of Maryland Francis Kind Carey School of Law in Baltimore for two decades.
The new 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy will be a “multi-disciplinary center focused on promoting the vision and values articulated in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution as the central source of America’s post-Civil War identity,” the university said.
Ifill did not immediately respond to a request for comment.