Institute of Politics

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.