Stephen Pershing

Steve Pershing, who has taught voting rights law at GW since 1999, is an experienced public interest litigator and law teacher with a lifelong passion for civil rights. From 1996 to 2005, he was a senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Justice Department, litigating minority voting rights across the nation. From 1989 to 1996, he litigated voting and other civil rights and liberties cases as legal director of the Virginia ACLU, and ever since then has served on its legal panel. He previously taught civil rights law as an adjunct at the William & Mary and American University law schools.

After leaving the Justice Department in 2005, Mr. Pershing served for four years as senior counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation, P.C., in Washington, a boutique aligned with the plaintiffs’ trial bar which litigates civil justice issues nationwide under the U.S. and state constitutions. From 2009 to 2011, he directed and taught in the Washington semester program for the law schools of the University of California, and from 2011 to 2016 he led a similar program of his own as a nonprofit consortium of law schools. During that time, he also began a solo practice in employment law, still on the side of people challenging discrimination. Today, in addition to his GW Law teaching, Mr. Pershing is counsel at Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch, P.C., a leading plaintiffs’-side employment law firm in Washington. He is president-elect of the Metropolitan Washington Employment Lawyers Association, the DC-area affinity bar for employee-side employment lawyers, until March 2027, when his two-year term as MWELA’s president is scheduled to begin.

Mr. Pershing is a 1979 graduate of Harvard College and a 1987 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, where in his third year he successfully sued his alma mater on behalf of student protesters under the First Amendment. From 1987 to 1989 he was law clerk to the late U.S. District Judge Julian A. Cook, Jr., of the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit, who presided over the $1 billion Northwest Flight 255 air crash litigation.

Mr. Pershing grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and New York, New York. He is a devoted amateur classical violinist and violist, a dad, and a former public radio music producer, cyclist, and sculler. You may see him zipping around town on a gray-green Vespa 300.