Biography
Cecillia Wang is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. She oversees over 200 lawyers and support staff in the national ACLU’s Legal Department, works in collaboration with hundreds more legal staff in the ACLU’s 54 state affiliates, and leads the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Wang has been an ACLU lawyer for more than two decades. From 2016 to 2024, she served as deputy legal director at the national ACLU and directed the Center for Democracy, which encompasses the ACLU’s work on immigrants’ rights; voting rights; national security; human rights; and speech, privacy, and technology. From 2011 to 2016, Wang directed the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. She has been an adjunct lecturer at the Berkeley and Stanford law schools.
Wang’s notable ACLU cases include: a Supreme Court argument concerning the interpretation of an immigration statute providing for civil detention without a hearing; a winning argument before the en banc Fourth Circuit in an Establishment Clause challenge to President Trump’s Muslim ban; a winning argument before the en banc Ninth Circuit in a due process challenge to an Arizona state constitutional provision prohibiting pretrial release of criminal defendants deemed to be unauthorized immigrants; a winning argument before the Eleventh Circuit challenging an Alabama state anti-immigrant law on federal preemption and equal protection grounds; and two trial victories in a long-running class action challenging racial profiling and illegal traffic stops and detentions by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
Wang began her career at the ACLU as a fellow in 1997-98 and then worked as an attorney with the federal public defender’s office for the Southern District of New York and at the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP. While in private practice, she was appointed to the federal Criminal Justice Act indigent defense panel for the Northern District of California.
Wang is a 1995 graduate of the Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor for The Yale Law Journal. She served as a law clerk to retired Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States, working in the chambers of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and to Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1992 with an A.B. in English (with highest honors) and Biology.