Margo

Schlanger

Schlanger is the author of dozens of law review and other scholarly articles 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 (West Academic Publishing, 2020). In 2025-2026, she will be Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

In addition to her research and writing, Schlanger does substantial work in civil rights litigation and prison and immigration reform. Most recently, she worked as a senior adviser at the US Department of Agriculture, leading USDA’s implementation of its Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. In summer 2024, the program distributed $2 billion to more than 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.

Schlanger took a two-year leave from the University of Michigan in 2010 and 2011 to serve as the presidentially appointed officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As the head of civil rights and civil liberties, she was the secretary’s lead adviser 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 DHS’s Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers, which recommended abolishing family detention. 

From 1995 to 1998, she was a trial attorney in the US 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 served on the Vera Institute’s blue ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, worked as an adviser 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.