Charles McLaurin is a Senior Counsel with the Legal Defense Fund, where he focuses on classroom censorship and racial biases in law enforcement.
Charles currently leads LDF’s team in NAACP v. Weaver, challenging a South Carolina law that censors K-12 public school curricula. Charles is also the lead attorney in Davis v. City of New York, which is part of the court-ordered monitoring of the NYPD and seeks systemic changes to the NYPD’s policies and practices pertaining to stop-and-frisk and trespass enforcement in New York City’s public housing.
Before joining LDF, Charles worked at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, where he represented wrongfully convicted men, working to secure their freedom. During his time at the Innocence Project, Charles successfully argued a request for postconviction DNA testing to challenge prior results on behalf of a client wrongfully convicted in Virginia.
Charles was also a litigation associate at Holland & Knight, where he represented clients in a variety of complex civil litigation matters. For two years during his tenure at Holland & Knight, Charles was a Chesterfield Smith Fellow within the firm’s Public and Charitable Service Department, where he devoted 100 percent of his practice to pro bono work.
Charles received his J.D. from Howard University School of Law. He received his B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Columbia University. He is barred in Virginia, D.C., and California.
