Tanner Lockhead is a Litigation Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund in Washington, DC. Tanner previously served as an AmeriCorps Fellow at the Community Empowerment Fund in North Carolina where he led initiatives on legal, employment, and crisis services for North Carolina residents transitioning out of homelessness and poverty. Before that, Tanner worked on LGBTQ discrimination at the Brookings Institution and human trafficking policy at the North Carolina Department of Justice.
While in law school, Tanner interned at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he focused on systemic police misconduct during the summer of 2020. He was also a Summer Associate at WilmerHale in DC where he helped litigate challenges to Confederate monuments throughout the South. Tanner received the Jane Marks Murphy Prize from Columbia Law School for his clinical work on access to justice in state civil courts, and he has published legal scholarship on disenfranchisement by felony conviction and the incarceration of LGBTQ individuals. Tanner joins the litigation team after serving as an LDF intern.
Tanner received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Hamilton Fellow, James Kent Scholar, and Patino Fellow. He received his B.A. in Public Policy, cum laude, from Duke University, where he was a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar and sat on the Duke Board of Trustees. Application for admission to the District of Columbia and North Carolina State Bars pending.
Tanner is not yet admitted to the bar. He is supervised by members of the DC bar.
