Elizabeth Simpson is a movement lawyer, writer, and Emancipate NC’s facilitator of emergent strategies, communications, and development. She has served as an adjunct professor at UNC School of Law in the Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic and Civil Clinic.
Elizabeth studied Political & Social Thought at the University of Virginia, writing her thesis on critical race and queer theories, and graduated from Yale Law School in 2009. She clerked at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She moved to Durham, North Carolina in 2010 after being awarded a fellowship to do deportation defense at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Elizabeth worked in the model of community lawyering, partnering with organizers and communities to support legal strategies with media and pressure tactics. Subsequently, she worked at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services. There, she primarily litigated civil rights suits to enforce incarcerated people’s rights, notably in Hayden v. Keller, which expanded parole for people sentenced to Life as juveniles. She has also worked at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, suing Donald Trump on behalf of undocumented activists.
Before, during, and after law school, Elizabeth has supported grassroots community organizing. She helped to found the Freedom Fighter Bond Fund in 2015 and the Protest Defense Network in 2020. She was arrested in the Moral Monday protests in 2013 and caught pre-vaccine COVID-19 while inspecting state prisons in January 2021 during litigation that freed over 4,500 people.
She is Co-Chair of the Board of the Southern Vision Alliance, a co-founder of the Serenity Hill Retreat Center, and the Treasurer of Somos Siembra. She is the mother of two activist children.