Media Contacts:
Rachel Larris, [email protected], 202-994-6460
WASHINGTON (April 13, 2022) — GW Law is bestowing the 2022 Honorable Charles R. Richey Equal Justice Award on Vanita Gupta, Associate Attorney General of the United States. Gupta serves as the third ranking official at the Department of Justice, where she supervises multiple litigating divisions within the Department of Justice, including the civil division, civil rights division, antitrust division, tax division and environmental and natural resources division.
"Associate Attorney General Gupta symbolizes the kind of career that Judge Richey would have loved: a fierce advocate for civil rights both inside the government and out,” said Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. “Ever since she finished law school, equal justice under the law has been her beacon, and we are proud to honor her for her many achievements and those yet to come."
Gupta has had a long career protecting civil rights, including serving as the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, as acting assistant Attorney General and head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and as deputy legal director and the director of the Center for Justice at the American Civil Liberties Union. She began her legal career as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Gupta graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received a law degree from New York University School of Law, where later she taught a civil rights litigation clinic for several years.
The Charles Robert Richey Equal Justice Award was established in memory of the Honorable Charles R. Richey of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The purpose of this award is to recognize a person — a judge, lawyer, civil libertarian, human rights activist, or all of the above — who is identified by words and deeds with equal justice in the U.S. and throughout the world. Previous winners have included Circuit Judge Patricia Wald, District Judges James Robertson and Paul Friedman and Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman.
GW Law will present the award to Associate Attorney General Gupta on Thursday, April 14 at 4pm in an event on-campus, that will include a discussion led by Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew. Media interested in attending the ceremony should contact Rachel Larris at [email protected] or 202-994-6460.