Bio
Scott Michelman is the Legal Director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia. Scott has litigated a broad range of civil rights and civil liberties issues, including access to the courts, disability rights, discrimination and selective enforcement, federal officer accountability, freedom of speech and press, habeas corpus, immigrants’ rights, judicial secrecy, LGBTQ+ rights, police misconduct, political protest, post-September 11 abuse of executive power, prisoners' rights, privacy rights, religious freedom, reproductive freedom, the rights of medical marijuana patients, sentencing law, and unreasonable search and seizure. He has also litigated cases about class action law, consumers’ rights, and workers’ rights.
Scott has argued before the United States Supreme Court, the highest courts of the District of Columbia and Massachusetts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, Tenth and D.C. Circuits, and numerous other federal and state courts around the country.
Additionally, Scott is Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Civil Rights and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he has been invited to teach Civil Rights Litigation for more than a dozen years. He has previously taught as clinical or adjunct faculty at American University Washington College of Law, Santa Clara Law School, Seton Hall Law School, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Scott is the author of the law school textbook Civil Rights Enforcement (Aspen, 3d. ed. forthcoming 2026).
In connection with his practice, Scott has been quoted by national radio, television, and print media outlets, including NPR, CNN, MSNBC/MSNow, Fox News, Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, The Guardian, ProPublica, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Politico, Buzzfeed, and The National Law Journal, and his commentary and opinion have appeared in SCOTUSblog, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His legal scholarship includes The Branch Best Qualified To Abolish Immunity, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1999 (2018); Doing Kimbrough Justice: Implementing Policy Disagreements With the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 45 Suffolk L. Rev. 1083 (2012) (with Jay Rorty); and Who Can Sue Over Government Surveillance? 57 UCLA L. Rev. 71 (2009), reprinted in 26 Saltzman & Wolvovitz, Civil Rights Litigation & Attorney Fees Annual Handbook 79 (2010).
Before joining the ACLU-DC in 2016, Scott was an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and before that the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and he went on to clerk for the Honorable Betty B. Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
A member of the British royal family once broke his thumb playing football under Scott’s supervision.
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