Federal law enforcement deployed in American cities:
What is legal, what isn’t, what’s murky?
Join the League of Women Voters’ "Virtual Brews & Views" for a conversation with U-M Law Professor Margo Schlanger, a leading authority on civil rights and law enforcement.
In several cities – Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan, and more – the Trump Administration has sent or threatened to send in federal law enforcement agents to confront crowds protesting racism and police violence against people of color and others. Professor Margo Schlanger will discuss what seems to be going on, the legality of the administration's use of federal authorities, and the possibilities for challenges to the deployment generally and some of its tactics more specifically. Professor Schlanger comes to the conversation informed by her long career as a civil rights lawyer and her past service under President Barack Obama as the head of civil rights for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that seems to have a lead role in many of the administration's troubling federal police efforts.
Bio:
Margo Schlanger, the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law, is a leading authority on civil rights issues and civil and criminal detention. She joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in fall 2009; she teaches constitutional law, torts, and classes relating to civil rights and to conditions of confinement in jails and prisons. She also founded and runs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
Professor Schlanger earned her J.D. from Yale in 1993. She clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from 1993 to 1995, and was subsequently a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. There, she worked to remedy civil rights abuses by prison and police departments. Schlanger served on the Vera Institute’s blue ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, as an advisor on proposed national standards implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and on the American Bar Association’s revision of its Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners. She served as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s presidentially-appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 2010 and 2011.
Professor 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 (2020), http://incarcerationlaw.com. You can find Schlanger's full CV and all of her publications on her homepage.
