Illinois State University has announced it will host civil rights attorney and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill at its annual Martin Luther King Jr. cultural dinner. The dinner will be on Friday, Jan. 26, in the Bone Student Center’s Brown Ballroom.
Ifill began her career as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, before joining the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), litigating voting rights cases as an assistant counsel. She then joined the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Law, teaching constitutional law and civil procedure for more than 20 years.
Ifill served as the seventh president and director-counsel of the LDF from 2013-2022.
Currently, she works as a distinguished professor of practice at Harvard Law School. She also is a Ford Foundation Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where she leads a project to study the values of the 14th Amendment through art. The 14th Amendment enshrines birthright citizenship.
Most recently, Ifill was appointed to be the inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair of Civil Rights at Howard University Law School, where she plans to launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy.
Along with her work in academia and as a practicing attorney, Ifill is responsible for opening several legal clinics, including one on reparations, and one of the first in the nation focused on challenging legal barriers to re-entry by ex-offenders. She has been published in several law journals and newspapers and has worked extensively as a scholar.
Tickets for the MLK dinner are available on Illinois State’s website until Jan. 12; the cost is $20 for students and $35 for non-students.
