Sherrilyn Ifill  Sherrilyn Ifill is an American lawyer. She is a law professor and president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She is the Legal Defense Fund's seventh president since Thurgood Marshall founded the organization in 1940. Ifill is also a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection. Sherrilyn Ifill was born on December 17, 1962, in Jamaica, Queens, New York to Lester (a Harlem social worker) and Myrtle. She is the youngest of 10 children. Her mother passed away when Ifill was 6 years old. She graduated from Hillcrest High School. Ifill has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. While in law school, Ifill clerked for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. the first summer and at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights the second summer. She served as assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, litigating Voting Rights Act cases including the landmark "Houston Lawyers' Association v. Attorney General of Texas". Her first job out of law school was a one-year fellowship with the ACLU in New York. In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of Maryland Law School, where she taught for two decades. She is the author of "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century", a 2008 finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. Ifill regularly appears in the media for her expertise on topics like affirmative action, policing, judicial nominees, and the Supreme Court. Ifill is married to Ivo Knobloch and has three children. She is a cousin of the late "PBS NewsHour" anchor Gwen Ifill. Their family immigrated to the U.S. from Barbados, with Sherrilyn's and Gwen's fathers, who were brothers, both becoming African Methodist Episcopal ministers. In 2016, Ifill won the Society of American Law Teachers Great Teacher Award. Ifill was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow in 2019.