Margo Schlanger

Margo Schlanger is the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. In 2010 and 2011, Schlanger served as the presidentially appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Obama-Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security. She led the civil rights office’s internal DHS oversight relating to issues such as immigration detention conditions, racial profiling, border screening, language access, and disability rights, and she chaired an interagency group addressing disability access to disaster planning and response. She founded and directs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, a national repository of information about large-scale civil rights cases. Schlanger has written and testified about how federal agencies can better implement civil rights goals, and has served as a court-appointed monitor in a statewide federal case protecting the rights of prisoners with disabilities. She was the principal drafter of the American Bar Association’s influential Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners, and author of the leading casebook on prisoners’ rights, The Law of Incarceration: Cases and Materials (West Academic 2020). A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Schlanger clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Justice Ginsburg’s first two terms on the Supreme Court of the United States.