Sherrilyn Ifill

Sherrilyn Ifill is an American attorney and the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. She is a law professor and the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was the seventh president of the Legal Defense Fund, an organization that Thurgood Marshall founded in 1940. Ifill is a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection. In 2021, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual Time 100 list. In 2025, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.