Michaele Turnage Young

Michaele N. Turnage Young serves as Senior Counsel and Co-Manager of the Equal Protection Initiative at the Legal Defense Fund (“LDF”), where she litigates education cases.

Ms. Turnage Young serves as lead counsel in Arnold v. Barbers Hill Independent School District, a hair discrimination case wherein the Court enjoined enforcement of a dress code provision that would have confined students who wore uncut locs to in-school suspension and excluded them from school activities. The Court’s decision, which recognized LDF’s clients’ likelihood of success on their race discrimination, sex discrimination, and freedom of expression claims, has led multiple school districts to revise their dress codes to remove discriminatory language. Ms. Turnage Young argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on behalf of LDF's clients.

Ms. Turnage Young clerked for the Honorable Joan B. Gottschall of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She received her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she served as a student attorney with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and as an editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Ms. Turnage Young earned her undergraduate degree from UCLA.