Deuel is Director of Litigation at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF). As one of two Directors of Litigation, Deuel co-leads the litigation department with Chris Kemmitt. Deuel supervises LDF’s cases related to ensuring equal educational opportunities and protecting equal access to the political process for African Americans and others. He has extensive experience litigating in these areas.
In the area of political participation, Deuel successfully argued Allen v. Milligan before the United States Supreme Court. In Milligan, the Supreme Court both upheld the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and affirmed an order requiring Alabama to create two majority-Black congressional districts for the first time ever. On remand, Deuel led the trial team and convinced a unanimous three-judge court to find that the Alabama Legislature intentionally discriminated against Black voters in enacting its revised 2023 congressional map. Among other litigation and advocacy, Deuel also supervises and contributed to the briefs of the LDF teams who blocked President Trump’s unconstitutional 2025 executive order on voting, won an injunction against Alabama’s discriminatory ban on voter assistance in 2024, and that secured a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana for the 2024 elections. He also co-led the trial teams that temporarily eased absentee voting restrictions in Alabama and South Carolina in 2020 and has overseen cases that restored preclearance review to parts of Alabama. Earlier in his career, he argued a challenge to Alabama’s voter ID law in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and helped to successfully challenge Texas’s discriminatory voter ID law.
In his supervision of LDF’s educational opportunities docket, Deuel helps to represent Black students in school desegregation and other cases across the country. He has recently overseen or contributed to LDF’s series of challenges to President Trump’s attacks on America’s education system. In 2022, he played a lead role in negotiating comprehensive, multi-year settlements with the State of Connecticut to resolve Sheff v. O’Neill, a landmark desegregation case. Deuel led the successful defense of the Sheff case in federal court. He previously led the team in Borel v. St. Martin Parish School Board, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a desegregation order entered after a 2021 trial. And he argued Banks v. St. James Parish School Board in the Fifth Circuit, which sought to integrate an all-Black charter school.
Deuel has testified before Congress and appeared on television programs, including CBS News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC, the ReidOut with Joy Reid, and All in with Chris Hayes. He has written multiple law review articles and op-eds on voting and civil rights issues. And his commentary has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, Bloomberg Law, the Guardian, and popular podcasts. Deuel previously worked as an adjunct professor at both the University of Pennsylvania Law School and New York University School of Law.
Prior to joining LDF, Deuel was a law firm associate and Civil Rights – LDF Fellow at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. He clerked for the Honorable Roger L. Gregory on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. And Deuel was a Karpatkin Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s national legal department. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of Southern California.
