Deborah Archer

Deborah N. Archer is an American civil rights lawyer and law professor. She is the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law. She also directs and founded the Community Equity Initiative at NYU Law and directs the Law School's Civil Rights Clinic. In 2021, Archer was elected president of the American Civil Liberties Union, becoming the first African American to hold the position in the organization’s history.

Early life and education Archer was born to Delroy and Paula Archer, both Jamaican migrants, in Windsor, Connecticut. Her father worked as a machinist at Colt Manufacturing, and her mother was a processing clerk at Fleet Bank. Archer is a first-generation American citizen and college graduate.

Archer graduated Smith College in 1993 with a degree in government, and earned her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1996. At Yale, she won the Charles G. Albom Prize. Archer was assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1998 to 2000, and then an associate at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett from 2000 to 2003.

In 2003, Archer joined the faculty of New York Law School (NYLS), where she was the first dean of diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, and associate dean for academic affairs and student engagement. She led the school’s Racial Justice Project and the Impact Center for Public Interest Law, which she co-founded. She is also a member of the boards of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. In 2016 and again in 2017, Archer served as acting chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the body that investigates allegations of police misconduct.

After 15 years at NYLS, Archer moved to New York University in July 2018. Archer is Jacob K. Javits Professor and Professor of Clinical Law, Co-Faculty Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law.

ACLU president On January 30, 2021, a remote meeting of the ACLU board elected Archer president of the organization, making her the first African American to hold the position in the organization’s 101-year history. As its eighth president, she chairs the board of directors, setting the direction the organization takes in civil litigation policies. In 2023, she received the Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers Award from the Clinical Legal Education Association I and the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award from the National Association of Women Lawyers. And in 2022, she was awarded the Smith Medal, the highest alumnae award given by Smith College. In 2016, Archer was honored by the New York Law Journal which cited her as one of its Top Women in Law. She also received the 2021 Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award from the American Association of Law Schools, and the Haywood Burns/Shanara Guilbert Award from the Northeast People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference. They live in Brooklyn with their two sons.

Selected works

Archer, Deborah N. Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. W.W. Norton & Company (2025). Archer, Deborah N.; Schottenfeld, Joseph (2024). "Defending Home: Toward a Theory of Community Equity". University of Chicago Law Review, forthcoming. Archer, Deborah N. (2021). "Transportation Policy and the Underdevelopment of Black Communities". Iowa Law Review 106: 2125.

Archer, Deborah N. (2020). “‘White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes’: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction”. Vanderbilt Law Review. 73: 1259. Archer, Deborah N. (2019–20). “Exile From Main Street”. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. 55: 788. Archer, Deborah N. (2019). The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances. Michigan Law Review. 118: 173.