- Pritzker Fellows
- Current Fellows
- Vince Warren
Vince Warren
Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights
Fall 2025 Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “Democracy in Retrograde: How Civil Society Can Defend the Rule of Law”
Biography
Vincent Warren is a leading expert on racial injustice and discriminatory policing and is the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the 2023 W. Haywood Burns Chair in Human and Civil Rights at CUNY Law School. He oversees the organization's groundbreaking litigation and advocacy work, using international and domestic law to challenge human rights abuses. Under his leadership, the organization has successfully challenged the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and profiling of Muslims, ended long-term solitary confinement in California’s Pelican Bay Prison, and established the persecution of LGBTQIA people as an international crime against humanity. The Center for Constitutional Rights is currently challenging the abuse of migrants at the U.S. southern border, environmental injustice in the south, the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and the criminalization of transgender people, as well as providing legal and policy support to Black, Brown, and Native organizers across the country.
Previously, Vince monitored South Africa's historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and was a senior staff attorney at the ACLU and a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of Haverford College and Rutgers School of Law.
Seminars
“Democracy in Retrograde: How Civil Society Can Defend the Rule of Law”
As the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vincent Warren has spent years on the frontlines of justice. Let’s dissect in real time the large political and legal questions that surround the current administration’s rapid-fire and unprecedented policy agenda, including but not limited to the purpose and impacts of “zone-flooding” with emergent policy initiatives. We will discuss several initiatives that impact marginalized communities, the organizations and institutions that support them and how civil society groups are mobilizing. I will help you critically and honestly assess what works and what doesn’t in service of transformational policy shifts through my “Activist, Lawyer, Storyteller” lens. Storytellers – which include journalists and artists – are key to shifting cultural narratives that keep repressive policies in place; activists and organizers center the impact of policies and a vision for advocacy, while lawyers can challenge the legal regimes that perpetuate the harm. When all three are working together, the shifts can be powerful over time.
This seminar aims to explore several of the key social policy initiatives we’re seeing from the current administration and why we’re seeing them now. We will explore the populist rhetoric and policy goals of the administration's first year through three roles that my career has embodied: 1) (Activist Lens) as a response to successful social movement and cultural interventions of the last 10 years such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too and Occupy Wall Street; 2) (Lawyer Lens) the powerful tensions with constitutional protections and democratic principles; and 3) (Storyteller Lens) the dominant narratives and counter narratives and how they impact the policy initiatives.
This seminar will explore the basic elements of our constitutional democracy – competitive elections, rights of political speech and association, and the rule of law – and the concept of constitutional retrogression, which is defined as the gradual erosion of these three basic elements. Students will be asked to discuss whether and how these elements are being eroded or safeguarded during the first year of the current administration, and when they are not.
Special Guest: Tom Ginsburg, Professor of International Law & Faculty Director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at The University of Chicago
We will discuss the role of social movements and policy groups in preventing constitutional and social retrogression. Over the last two decades the activists and organizers played key roles to defend voting rights, free speech and the rule of law. Were these interventions successful, and if so, to what extent? What guidance can they give us for the current political and legal environment?
Let’s explore the use of terrorism framing and criminalization narratives as a means to manufacture fear and the need for urgent military and law enforcement framing.
Why and how has the current administration has targeted particular groups, institutions and ideas. We explore the policy underpinnings in Project 2025 and discuss the administration’s focus on Immigrants, LGBTQI+ people, Palestinian human rights advocates, academia, law firms and equity initiatives.
Plenty of lawyers are working behind the scenes – but at the tip of the spear – to address authoritarian experimentation and a review of the status and efficacy of litigation.
Special Guest (via Zoom): Lina Srivastava, Founder of the Center for Transformation Change
Let us speak with visionary storytellers who will share their insights and experiences over the course of 2025. They will also share their deepest concerns, greatest hopes and what they see as necessary work leading into the midterm elections.
Special Guest: Baher Azmy, Legal Director of the Center of Constitutional Rights