Virginia "Ginny" Sloan

Virginia “Ginny” Sloan founded The Constitution Project in 1997 and led it for 20 years, overseeing its merger into POGO in 2017. Under her leadership, TCP enjoyed remarkable success in addressing issues as diverse as government-sanctioned torture of terrorist suspects, the death penalty, and privacy and surveillance protections. After law school and a federal judicial clerkship, she was a Deputy Federal Public Defender in Los Angeles and then worked for the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee beginning in 1980. As counsel, she worked with notable House members, including Father Robert Drinan, Robert Kastenmeier, and Don Edwards, on criminal justice reform, civil rights and civil liberties, and privacy law until she left to create TCP in 1997. From 1995 till 1997, she was the Executive Director of the D.C. Circuit’s Task Force on Gender, Race, and Ethnic Bias. Ginny has also served on the boards of directors at the Southern Center for Human Rights, Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, Washington Council of Lawyers (and now the Honorary Board), and the Washington D.C. affiliate of the ACLU.