Margo Schlanger

Guest Author

Margo Schlanger (@mjschlanger) is the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.  She also heads the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. She is the lead author of the casebook “Incarceration and the Law” and the author of, inter alia, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,” 6 Harv. Nat’l Sec. J. 112 (2015) and “Offices of Goodness: Influence Without Authority In Federal Agencies,” 36 Cardozo L. Rev. 53 (2014).

In 2010 and 2011, she was on leave from Michigan, serving as the presidentially appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  In that capacity, she served as the Homeland Security Secretary’s lead advisor on civil rights and civil liberties issues, testified before Congress, chaired the Interagency Coordinating Council on Emergency Preparedness and Individuals with Disabilities, served on the first U.S. Delegation to the UN Universal Periodic Review, and met with community leaders and groups across America to ensure that their perspectives regarding civil rights and homeland security were considered in the Department’s policy process.
Prof. Schlanger earned her JD from Yale in 1993. She then served as law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1993 to 1995. From 1995 to 1998, she was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where she worked to remedy civil rights abuses by prison and police departments and earned two Division Special Achievement awards. Prof. Schlanger, a leading authority on civil rights issues and civil and criminal detention, served on the Vera Institute’s blue ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons; worked as an advisor on the development of proposed national standards implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act; and served as the reporter for the American Bar Association’s revision of its Standards Governing the Legal Treatment of Prisoners.