Margo Schlanger 
Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law
Director, Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
@mjschlanger (Twitter)
Professor Schlanger teaches constitutional law, torts, and classes relating to civil rights and to prisons. She also founded and runs the
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. She joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009; previously, she had been a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and an assistant professor at Harvard University. She was voted David M. Becker Professor of the Year in 2008 at Washington University School of Law.
Professor Schlanger is the author of dozens of law review and other scholarly articles (some are listed below), and is a frequent commentator online and in print on civil rights topics. She is the lead author of a leading casebook, Incarceration and the Law (2020),
http://incarcerationlaw.com. (You can find a full CV and all of her publications in the pages linked on the left.)
In addition to her research and writing, Professor Schlanger does substantial work in civil rights and prison and immigration reform. Most recently, she worked as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading USDA's implementation of its Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, which in summer 2024 distributed $2 billion to over 43,000 people who had experienced discrimination in USDA farm lending. She was class counsel in
Hamama v. Adducci, a national class action to ensure due process for Iraqi nationals whom the Trump Administration sought to deport. She was the court-appointed monitor for a
statewide settlement dealing with deaf prisoners in Kentucky. And she has served as an expert in numerous cases addressing detention conditions. She took a two-year leave from the University in 2010 and 2011, serving as the presidentially appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As the head of civil rights and civil liberties for DHS, she was the Secretary's lead advisor on civil rights and civil liberties issues. Later in the Obama Administration, she assisted in the development of DHS policies relating to reducing sexual abuse and the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention. She also served on the Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers, which
recommended abolishing family detention.
Professor Schlanger earned her J.D. from Yale in 1993. While there, she served as book reviews editor of the
Yale Law Journal and received the Vinson Prize. 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. Schlanger, a leading authority on civil rights issues and civil and criminal detention, served on the Vera Institute’s blue ribbonCommission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons; she worked as an advisor on the development of proposed national standards implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and testified before the Prison Rape Elimination Commission. She also served as the reporter for the American Bar Association’s revision of its
Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners, and as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law and the Social Sciences.
A full list of scholarly and non-scholarly publications, with links, is available on the publications page. For examples of Professor Schlanger's recent scholarship, see
Ending the Discriminatory Pretrial Incarceration of People with Disabilities: Liability under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, 17
Harv. L & Pol'y Rev. 231 (2022) (with Elizabeth Jordan & Roxanna Moussavian).
LinkPandemic Rules: Covid-19 and the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s Exhaustion Requirement, 72
Case Western L. Rev. 533 (2022) (2021 PLRA symposium) (with Betsy Ginsburg).
LinkIncarceration and the Law: Cases and Materials (West Academic 2020), with Sheila Bedi & David Shapiro, with yearly supplements. First chapter excerpted
here.
Effective Communication with Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Blind, and Low Vision Incarcerated People, Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse White Paper Series: Learning from Civil Rights Lawsuits (June 2022) (with Tessa Bialek), at
https://clearinghouse.net/policy/1/1; 26 J. Gender, Race & Just. 133 (2023) (
link).
Multi-LexSum: Real-world Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularities, arXiv:2206.10883v3 (NeurIPS 2022 Datasets and Benchmarks) (June 2022) (June 2022) (with Zejiang Shen, Kyle Lo, Lauren Yu, Nathan Dahlberg, & Doug Downey).
LinkPrisoners with Disabilities: Law and Policy, in
Public Health Behind Bars (Springer, Robert B. Greifinger, ed., 2022).
LinkPrison and Jail Civil Rights/Conditions Cases: Longitudinal Statistics 1970-2021 (Apr. 2022) (Working Paper).
LinkNarrowing the Remedial Gap: Damages for Disability Discrimination in Outsourced Federal Programs, 88
U. Chi. L. Rev. Online (March 5, 2021);
Link to Online Law Review;
Link to SSRN PDF
Mapping the Iceberg: The Impact of Data Sources on the Study of District Courts, 17
J. Emp. Legal Stud. 466 (2020) (with Christina Boyd and Pauline Kim);
LinkIncrementalist vs. Maximalist Reform: Solitary Confinement Case Studies,
115
Northwestern U .L. Rev. 273
(2020);
Link;
Technical appendixThe Constitutional Law of Incarceration, Reconfigured, 103 Cornell L. Rev. 357 (2018); Link
Professor Schlanger also writes frequently for publications like the Democracy Journal, Politico Magazine, the American Prospect, and others.
She is married to Law School Professor Samuel Bagenstos; they have a son and a daughter.