Michigan Law professor honored for promoting equity and social change

Professor Margo Schlanger

By Bob Needham
Michigan Law

Professor Margo Schlanger will be honored next month for her efforts to support women, diversity, and equity.

The Center for the Education of Women+ at the University of Michigan announced that Schlanger, the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law, will receive its Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change. The U-M advocacy group Girls Who Code will also receive the award.

Named after former CEW+ Director Carol Hollenshead, the award honors those who “have proven that social change is possible through persistent hard work and who demonstrate that one person can make a lasting difference in their communities,” according to the CEW+ website.

Schlanger is an authority on civil rights issues and civil and criminal detention. She joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009 and teaches Torts, Constitutional Law, and classes relating to civil rights and to jails and prisons.

She also founded and runs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, a website that posts information about thousands of large-scale civil rights cases nationwide. Michigan Law students summarize and analyze the cases, and the site is visited by over 25,000 people each month.

“I wasn’t lucky enough to know Carol Hollenshead, but I have heard what a truly effective and inclusive leader she was. I’m pleased and honored to receive an award in her name,” Schlanger said.

“It’s the mission of CEW+ to help people at the University reach their academic, economic, and professional potential. I hope my work furthers that same agenda, in the community. So this award is very meaningful to me.”

Schlanger has a long history of projects inside and outside the University aiming to improve civil rights and reduce abuses by government institutions. Most recently, she served as a senior adviser at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), where she led the development and implementation of the department’s historic Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. Over the summer, the program distributed $2 billion to more than 43,000 individuals who experienced discrimination in USDA farm lending.

During the first Trump administration, she was class counsel in Hamama v. Adducci, a national class action that halted administration efforts to deport more than a thousand Iraqi nationals, most long-term residents of Southeast Michigan.

During the Obama administration, she served as the presidentially appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and assisted in the development of DHS policies relating to reducing sexual abuse and the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention.

Schlanger has authored dozens of law review and other scholarly articles, and is a frequent commentator online and in print on civil rights topics. She was the principal drafter of the American Bar Association’s Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners and is the lead author of the casebook Incarceration and the Law (West Academic Publishing, 2020).

The award will be presented from 3 to 5 p.m. on February 13 in the Michigan League’s Hussey Room.

At the same ceremony, the Academic Women’s Caucus’s 2025 Sarah Goddard Power Award will be presented to Laura Balzano, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the College of Engineering, and associate professor of statistics in LSA, for her significant contributions to the betterment of women.


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